Gaurav Baheti

Founder & CEO Procol

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

Gaurav Baheti is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Procol, an India-based procurement and sourcing platform built for large enterprises. The company addresses a problem that is unglamorous but enormous in aggregate: procurement at most large Indian companies still runs on spreadsheets, email and paper, which makes spend invisible, sourcing slow and negotiation leverage weak. Procol digitises that process end to end — supplier registration, sourcing events, negotiation and purchase-order workflow — and reports managing procurement spend in excess of ₹20,000 crore for a customer base of more than 40 large enterprises, among them Reliance, Havells, VIP, IKEA, Decathlon and Zomato. Baheti co-founded the company with Sumit Mendiratta, and both were named to the Forbes Asia 30 Under 30 list. He came to it from a product design background, having worked at Google in New York and at Zomato, and having volunteered on IndiaStack, India’s open digital public infrastructure programme.

Career Highlights

• Founder and CEO of Procol, co-founded with Sumit Mendiratta.
• Named to the Forbes Asia 30 Under 30 list, as was his co-founder.
• Built a customer base of more than 40 large enterprises including Reliance, VIP, Havells, IKEA, Decathlon and Zomato, across manufacturing, retail, financial services and pharmaceuticals.
• Procol reports managing procurement spend in excess of ₹20,000 crore.
• Raised ₹51 crore in 2022 from GMO Venture Partners, Alarko Ventures, Esas Ventures, FounderBank Capital and Anchorage Capital, with Blume Ventures, Beenext and Sequoia Surge (now Peak XV) participating.
• Grew the company from two people in a small North Delhi office to a team of more than 80.
• Volunteered with the iSPIRT Foundation on IndiaStack from 2016 to 2018.

Professional Journey

Baheti’s early career was in product design rather than in procurement or enterprise software. He interned as a product designer at Zomato in 2014, worked as a UX designer at Google in New York in 2015, and subsequently worked as a product designer at TableHero and as a partner at Spars. The Google stint was short — roughly four months — but the design orientation stuck, and it shows in how Procol is positioned: the pitch is less about procurement theory than about replacing an interface that nobody wants to use with one that people will actually adopt.

Between 2016 and 2018 he volunteered with the iSPIRT Foundation on IndiaStack, the open digital public infrastructure initiative behind India’s identity, payments and data-sharing layers. That work placed him among the people building the substrate on which a generation of Indian software businesses would be constructed, and it is a meaningful part of his formation as a founder even though it was unpaid.

He founded Procol with Sumit Mendiratta in the 2017-2018 period — the company’s own materials give both years in different places — starting with two people in a small office in North Delhi. Mendiratta brought experience from OYO and Zomato; the founding team drew from Google New York, Zomato and OYO alumni. The thesis was that Indian enterprise procurement was almost entirely undigitised, that the buying organisations were large and the savings from better sourcing were immediate and measurable, and that the constraint was usability rather than functionality.

Procol grew into an enterprise sales business, winning large industrial and retail customers including Reliance, Havells, VIP, IKEA, Decathlon and Zomato, and by the company’s own account now supports more than 40 major enterprises and a team of over 80 people. Investors have included Blume Ventures, Beenext and Sequoia Surge — since renamed Peak XV — and in 2022 the company raised ₹51 crore in a round joined by GMO Venture Partners, Alarko Ventures, Esas Ventures, FounderBank Capital and Anchorage Capital. Baheti and Mendiratta were both recognised on the Forbes Asia 30 Under 30 list.

Education

No education could be established with adequate confidence. Contact-data aggregators report a Bachelor of Commerce in Finance from Savitribai Phule Pune University and earlier schooling at DLDAV Model School, but the sourcing is weak and the reported dates would place the degree after both the Google role and Procol’s founding. Rather than record a possibly misdated credential, no education entry is asserted.