CPG startup Keychain snags $30M to build in India, grow in the U.S.

Keychain, a U.S. startup that helps consumer brands find manufacturing partners, has raised $30 million in fresh funding as it looks to scale its India-based development team to drive growth in North America.

While headquartered in New York, Keychain operates as a distributed company with its core engineering and product development centered in India. The startup is doubling down on this model with the new funding, aiming to grow its engineering, product design, and analytics teams in Gurugram from 35 to 70 in the coming months, and to around 100 within a year. This India-based team already represents half of Keychain’s 70-person global headcount, with about 20 employees in New York and the remainder in Austin, handling partnerships, go-to-market, and sales.

The strategy is deliberate. Despite only serving Western markets, Keychain has built its primary development operations in in Gurugram — which is the country’s second-largest tech hub after Bengaluru — to develop its consumer packaged goods (CPG) platform for clients in North America. The software platform already helps eight of the top 10 retailers, including 7-Eleven and Whole Foods, and seven of the top CPG brands, such as General Mills, connect with potentially suitable manufacturers, according to the startup. So why India?

“It’s the talent, depth, availability, and the speed with which you can access talent of that depth and availability [in India],” said Oisin Hanrahan, co-founder and CEO of Keychain, in an interview.

Hanrahan co-founded Keychain in 2023 with Umang Dua — his co-founder at Handy, a home services software startup later acquired by Angi — and Jordan Weitz. Dua, who is originally from New Delhi, has been a “natural advantage” in building Keychain’s core teams in Gurugram, Hanrahan said.

Both Hanrahan and Dua spent time structuring Keychain’s teams across India and the U.S., ultimately choosing India as the company’s engineering hub. The decision was shaped by their experience at Handy and Angi, where they found it challenging to build a “sustainable, enduring” engineering team in the U.S.

“We’ve thought about engineering as: how do we build a core, sustainable engineering organization that can get to scale reasonably quickly, that has endurance, that’s got deep talent pools, and AI exposure that can take on real, important challenges, that’s commercially minded? And we looked at where we had those teams before, when we were at Handy and Angi, and obviously, India is just an amazing location and really checks a lot of those boxes,” Hanrahan told TechCrunch.

Several U.S. startups, especially those developing SaaS solutions, base their engineering and product teams in cities like Bengaluru, Gurugram, and Noida. In recent months, the country has also seen a wave of multinational companies establishing offshore hubs, often referred to as global capability centers. But unlike most of these firms — which also target Indian consumers even as many say India is harder to sell into — Keychain stands apart. It more closely resembles companies like the UK’s Deliveroo and Southeast Asia’s Gojek and Grab — all of which tap into India’s tech talent for product development and R&D without having a market presence in the country.

“India’s position as a global technology hub has made it a compelling destination for product development, even for startups that have no direct business in the country,” said Neha Singh, co-founder of the Bengaluru-based private market intelligence platform Tracxn, in an interview with TechCrunch.

India’s time zone also allows teams to work beyond U.S. hours, enabling near-continuous development cycles, Singh added.

KeychainOS as the next big thing coming from Indian talent

Keychain plans to use its India team not only to improve its current platform — launched in February 2024 and used by over 20,000 brands and retailers to find manufacturing partners — but also to build new AI-powered software that helps manufacturers manage their product cycles more efficiently and with better oversight.

Called KeychainOS, the software will have four modules, with the first one already available. This module helps manufacturers comply with their food safety requirements, using AI to take quantitative data and convert it into a qualitative report that can be shared with auditors. The software can also pull data using natural language when an auditor requests a specific insight, Hanrahan told TechCrunch.

The other three modules of the software will focus on purchasing and procurement, inventory, and production planning, the executive noted.

The OS offering will compete with traditional ERP systems like Oracle, QAD, and Plex, which require add-ons like TraceGains and Redzone to be usable for manufacturers, the startup said.

In addition to its KeychainOS for manufacturers, Keychain has embedded AI into its search and discovery layer to help retailers quickly find relevant third-party manufacturers for their products.

Keychain already helps brands and retailers find third-party manufacturers in food, beverage, supplements, health, and beauty categories and is looking to expand its platform to pet and household products later this year.

Currently, the startup serves businesses in the U.S. and Canada and is aiming to enter Europe later this year.

While the startup offers its software free to brands and retailers, manufacturers pay to access the platform and get discovered. KeychainOS provides them with another reason to engage.

Keychain already has over 30,000 manufacturers on its platform, with “hundreds and hundreds” paying to use it. These customers pay anywhere from $10,000 to over $100,000, Hanrahan said, adding that the startup earns around $20,000 per manufacturer annually on average.

Keychain’s Series B round was led by Wellington Management and existing investor BoxGroup, alongside other existing investors. With this funding, the startup has raised $68 million in total. Of that, Hanrahan told TechCrunch that the startup still has over $50 million in the bank.

The startup had a post-money valuation of $260 million in its last round of $15 million in November 2024. Hanrahan did not disclose the current valuation but said it was a “good step up.”