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 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.
Keychain co-founders Jordan Weitz, Oisin Hanrahan, and Umang Dua (Left to right) Image Credits:Keychain
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.
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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 U.K.’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.
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