Part Analytics Inc.

Location: Waukesha

Founders: Jithendra Palasagaram and Jesil Pujara

Founded: February 2019

Service: SaaS solution for procurement analytics of electronic components

Website: partanalytics.com

Employees: 2

Goal: Obtain pilots with two large OEMs.

Experience: Palasagaram worked for 13 years at GE Healthcare, where he was most recently senior manager of global sourcing. Pujara worked for eight years at GE Healthcare, where he was most recently electro-mechanical component standardization and library leader, and previously was a senior mechanical engineer at Square D/Schneider Electric.

Jithendra Palasagaram and Jesil Pujara took a big leap when they recently left their secure corporate jobs at GE Healthcare to run their Waukesha startup, Part Analytics.

Founded in 2017, Part Analytics is a cloud-based SaaS solution for procurement analytics of electronic components. Procurement specialists at Fortune 200-size manufacturing corporations use it to identify suppliers, negotiate contracts and price materials.

The co-founders, both 39, recently completed a $625,000 seed funding round for the company, which they plan to use for full-scale product development and for sales and marketing.

An electronic board that is part of an MRI scanner, for example, could have thousands of different components, all coming from different suppliers, Palasagaram said.

“These parts come from all over the globe,” he said. “Even if one small part that costs $1 doesn’t come in to the factory on time, we can’t assemble it and we cannot ship it out to our customers.”

Palasagaram and Pujara met when they teamed up on a New Venture Challenge while Palasagaram was studying for his MBA at the University of Chicago. Part Analytics received a funding grant from the university in 2017 and used it to build a prototype and get customer feedback. They have since completed the gBETA program in Milwaukee.

“This actually came from my experience in sourcing,” with data spread across multiple systems and spreadsheets, Palasagaram said. “What our platform does is bring all that data into one place and generate insights.”

Now, the pair has conducted a pilot of the platform for a Fortune 200 company, and is in discussions with another Fortune 200 OEM, he said.

“(The pilot company) had a key customer installation going on and they couldn’t find a part that goes into one of the products for the installation and that part was not available anywhere and they reached out to us: ‘Can you help us?’” Palasagaram said. “Within 24 hours we actually found a part…to mitigate the issue that they had.”

They hope to hire two more employees this year as they work to bring on two major customers to pilot the platform. ν