A Journey From The Sets Of Nanban As A Corporate Employee To Becoming The CEO Of His Own Company!

Sometimes, great ideas come from the least expected places. Such is the story of Tamizh Inian, an ordinary corporate worker. As an industrial solution provider in his company, he got an opportunity to work on the sets of Nanban, the Tamil remake of 3 Idiots.

His team developed a scooter prototype for the film set, which later became the most significant break in his career. It became a successful model and soon, he was building similar prototypes and earning an estimated INR 9 - 10 lakhs per year.

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Seeing its success, this was turned into a full-fledged business opportunity and was christened the name ‘Frigate’. He was later joined by his brother as a cofounder in March 2022.

The Story Of A Grand Idea

The success factor behind Tamizh’s startup was the fact that he built something that had previously never been done before. Most large companies in India focus on their core business and usually outsource their prototyping mostly to cut costs or due to the lack of in-house capabilities.

Tamizh’s idea was to build something to bridge this gap. Initially, the requests came in from the automobile sector, which later extended to other fields.

“India has a lot of gaps in the product development area. The personnel are technically skilled, but not good enough in marketing, which is not letting them go global. Their operations are getting delayed because they don’t have global experience,”  said Tamizh.

Today, Tamizh has built around 1300 prototypes. At present, it has 27 clients out of which 20 are manufacturing and 7 prototype clients.

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The Outsourcing Problem And The Solution

How does outsourcing exactly work? Large enterprises do not work on their products from start to finish. The focus is put only on its core business area while the other components are sent to other companies for completion. Apple using hardware components sourced from Samsung back in the day could be seen as an example.

The issue with this method is the sheer amount of time it takes for an enterprise to identify such companies. Although it is effective in cost reduction, when it comes to the manufacturing field, time equals money.

Frigate aims to address the problem by being a single point of contact for any type of product to be manufactured or prototyped.

It has evolved from a prototype-only startup to a full-scale cloud manufacturing company that provides fabrication, 3D printing, and CNC machining services.

“Started as a prototyping company, we pivoted as our customers wanted their designs to be manufactured as well. For this, we onboarded SMEs from all over India to cater to the increasing demand from across the world,” said Tamizh.

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As the team started building more prototypes, it began receiving more orders for manufacturing. And now using its marketplace platform, it is able to connect vendors with the raw materials required for manufacturing. Till March 2021, it has claimed to have completed around 40 manufacturing orders and has manufacturing units at Trichy and Coimbatore. The prototyping/manufacturing services provided by Frigate come with a fixed margin charged by the company. It may vary from 10% to 300%.

It has also succeeded in onboarding 150 SMEs (Small and medium-sized enterprises) onto the platform from locations across India.

Scope In The Global Market

According to IBEF, India holds the potential to become a global manufacturing hub by 2030 and contribute more than USD 500 billion to the global economy. Its manufacturing sector has the potential to reach USD 1 trillion by 2025.

Frigate started with an initial investment of INR 10 lakh and in April 2022, it received pre-seed funding amounting to USD 1,75,000 from investors including angel investor Vel Kanniappan; Founders of Zetwerk, IppoPay, M2P, Wilco Source USA, and bitsCrunch; Abhishek Raj Pandey, Head of Sourcing and Procurement, Mamaearth, etc. The new funding would be used to strengthen the company’s technology stack.

“Tamizh is solving a real problem within the manufacturing space that I relate to,” said Srinath Ramakkrushnan, Co-founder of Zetwerk.

The Road Ahead

Frigate is currently a 23-member team with 13-15 members working on prototyping and 8 on cloud manufactring. It is planning to increase the headcount to a 100 during the next financial year and set up offices in Chennai and Bengaluru. It also plans to move the headquarters from Trichy to Chennai. It also aims to increase vendors from 300 to 600 by 2026.

“We would like to acquire 200 more customers and be a $100M company in the next three years,” says Tamizh. Will this be the story of yet another unicorn startup from India? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

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