Introduction
If you’ve ever been in the middle of a home renovation and suddenly run out of pipes, or realized the electrician is waiting on a delivery that’s nowhere in sight, you already understand the problem Abhishek Rao, Shaurya Jindal and Shaurya Goel are trying to solve. Their startup is doing something surprisingly simple, that is bringing speed, reliability, and structure to the chaotic world of construction material procurement. And so far, it seems to be working.
The Gap Nobody Was Talking About
Most people associate quick commerce with groceries or medicines. But the HandyPanda team spotted a very different kind of urgency, one that plays out on construction sites and in homes being renovated every single day.
The problem, as they describe it, isn’t just about delivery speed. It’s about the entire experience of sourcing construction material. Figuring out the right product, finding a reliable supplier, getting a fair price, and having it arrive when you actually need it. And when things go wrong on a construction site, delays don’t stay small. A six-month project quietly becomes a nine-month one, costing homeowners both time and money.
How the Platform Actually Works
Right now, the startup operates out of a single store in Gurgaon, running what Abhishek Rao calls a semi quick commerce model. Most orders are fulfilled within an hour. The slightly larger radius this model enables means they can serve a good chunk of their current market from just that one location.
For bulkier or slower-moving items they don’t stock themselves, they’ve built agreements with distributors and manufacturers who can step in when needed. Those orders take anywhere between an hour and a half to three hours, but the promise is still there. The goal going forward is to bring more and more of that inventory in-house as they scale.
Quality & Pricing Control in a Market Full of Fakes
Anyone who’s spent time around hardware stores knows the quality problem is real. The same product can cost twenty rupees or two hundred and fifty, and the difference is entirely in what you’re actually getting.
Abhishek Rao says their edge here came from within the founding team itself. Co-founder Shaurya Jindal comes from a family with a manufacturing business in pipes and fittings, which gave them an unusually strong foundation of supply chain knowledge from day one. They already knew which suppliers to trust, what fair pricing looked like, and which red flags to watch out for.
Beyond that, it’s been an iterative process which involved expanding the supply network carefully, asking for references, testing quality themselves, and listening closely to customer feedback. There was even an instance where a customer flagged a product that failed after a couple of days. That supplier was dropped, and a new one was brought in. That kind of responsiveness, Abhishek Rao says, is how trust gets built.
The Hardest Part of Building in an Undigitized Industry
When you decide to digitize an industry that has never been digital, you quickly realize there’s no roadmap to follow. Abhishek Rao describes this as their biggest challenge. Building out a product catalog for construction materials meant starting from scratch, verifying everything manually, along with AI, and creating something that simply didn’t exist before.
On top of that, skepticism was everywhere. Hardware stores had tried online channels before and seen them fail. Suppliers were reluctant to share catalogs or enter supply agreements. Everyone had a reason to doubt that this would work. Getting past that skepticism has been slow and required a lot of persistence.
What’s Next: Expanding Beyond Gurgaon
The plan is to expand across Delhi NCR by the second half of this year, with Noida likely being the first step given the team’s existing connections there. A larger funding round is expected soon, which would accelerate that expansion significantly. If things go to plan, they’d have a solid hold on Delhi NCR by the end of the year and begin entering their first new city sometime in the following year.
They’ve already raised an initial pre-seed round of around two crore rupees, announced earlier this year. The round was led by AJVC, whose founder (Aviral Bhatnagar) came on board with high conviction after just one conversation. Other participants included angels, and friends and family, among them Sankalp Kathuria, Co-Founder and CEO of Broadway, whom Abhishek had previously worked with at Zomato.
Advice for Founders Just Starting Out
Abhishek Rao’s advice is to go AI-first with everything, iterate fast, and don’t lock yourself into one idea before you’ve actually tested it. Try a few things, see what gets traction, and give yourself the best possible shot at finding something that works. The founders who move quickly and stay curious, he believes, have a real edge over those who go all in before they’ve validated anything. The one thing AI can’t replace, he adds, is taste. If you understand your customers, know what they actually want, and can make good judgment calls, then AI just makes you faster at everything else.
Interview by : Khevna Reddy
