Bangalore-based startup Tarnea brings digital technology to brick-and-mortar stores

The e-commerce boom has sent a sudden wave of digitisation across the country. It has not only intensified the competition, but also brought in awareness of how technology plays a huge role in simplifying our day to day lives, not only of users but also sellers. Bangalore-based Tarnea is one such startup that aims at bringing digitisation to bricks and mortar stores. It brings real-time tracking of stocks and sales to these sellers with its SmartMile platform, putting an end to hassled end-of-the-day manual bills sorting. It helps offer visibility of the stock and empower the unorganised stores with a platform that is handy and simple to use. Tarnea has also served more than 1 million consumers and its platform has witnessed over 1.6 million transactions. Tarnea’s proprietary platform SmartMile connects sellers with vendors and suppliers to help them come at par with some of the big retailers, when it comes to tech platform for handling visibility of stocks. The platform provides automation aimed at faster velocity of sales, more control over the inventory, avoid lost sales, make better decisions and better customer service. “It also connects the retailers to e-commerce and e-marketplaces to buy from a larger number of suppliers also increasse their sales turnover by selling online through our SmartMile platform. Anyone with basic literacy can start using it in less than 30 minutes”, co-founder Suresh Satyamurthy tells us. In fact, remembering his experience at the National Dairy Development Board (NDDB) in the early 90s, Satyamurthy says that visibility to stocks and sales at the retail shelf was the single biggest problem then, even though the company had one of the best infrastructure for material handling, logistics and a state-of-the-art ERP. He realised that not much has changed even after decades and that is what led to the formation of Tarnea in 2013 by the trio – Satyamurthy along with Madhav Sitaraman and Senthil Rajagopalan. “We did an extensive first-hand research of the Indian market by traveling across India – including rural areas in markets like UP, Haryana, Rajasthan, Karnataka & Tamil Nadu . We could sense that the purchasing power the Indian retailer has gone up tremendously over the last two decades, but the usage of technology to run their operations was still very minimal,” Satyamurthy  adds. The trio has managed the smooth sailing of the company on their own so far, but have started looking for funding. They also also shortlisted for Microsoft Accelerator for its six-weeks program. The revenue model is subscription based on its users and also the success fee per transaction. The company is also looking to expand their presence in new markets and is in talks for some significant partnerships.