Making Building Hardware Easier: Why We Funded Workbench

Dorm Room Fund is excited to announce our investment in Workbench, a next-generation software platform to power the supply chain operations of any company building physical products. While building their first hardware company, Workbench founders Prince Ghosh and Lucas Fridman realized supply chain management was a massive problem. With first-hand exposure to this inefficiency, Prince and Lucas set out to level the playing field by making hardware as easy to produce and manage as software.

Supply Chain Management Is a Nightmare

Information mismanagement and difficulty sourcing suppliers at every stage of a company’s lifecycle create massive bottlenecks that are paid for with time and money.

Small companies are mashing together general-purpose tools like Asana, Dropbox, Excel, and Quickbooks with a smaller sample using Python scripts and Zapier to automate some workflows. However, these tools were never meant for heavy-duty supply chain management, and lead to a lot of manual work to keep these systems usable.

When these companies start to scale, these ad hoc systems break down. They are then forced to purchase monolithic, expensive enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to capture this data and maintain a source of truth. Granted, tools like SAP are often not cloud-based and rarely receive updates, take months to implement, and can cost hundreds of thousands, making these solutions infeasible for any company not attaining millions in ARR.

When Workbench founders Prince and Lucas were building their first hardware company, they faced these information management problems themselves, even losing a deal because of a lost email. Realizing how many other companies must be slowed down or even crushed by these problems, they set out to create a solution.

Workbench’s Solution — A Unified Workflow

Want to read the rest? Check out the full-length article on our blog.

Written by Shohini Gupta, Dorm Room Fund Partner (SF). Follow her on Twitter.

Cover image by Lenny Khune on Unsplash

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