Founders Everywhere: Akash Nandi
Akash Nandi is the co-founder and CEO of Tendrel, a workforce optimization platform built for frontline industries.
Welcome to Founders Everywhere, where we highlight the incredible people behind the companies we’ve backed at Everywhere Ventures, a global pre-seed fund supported by a community of 500 founders and operators.
Tendrel is reimagining the toolbox for foundational industries like farming, manufacturing, and warehousing, which are essential to the economy but often overlooked by technology builders. These sectors rely on outdated, manual processes that hinder productivity and predictability; Tendrel provides modern infrastructure that manages the flow of people, products, and processes. By empowering workers with a data-driven toolkit, Tendrel not only enhances operational efficiency but also supports workforce development and recognition, potentially transforming the lives and careers of those who have been underserved by technology.
Co-founders Akash Nandi, CEO, and Mark Keller, CTO, worked together at an advanced farming company that excelled in automation and IoT, but lacked effective workflow management. Recognizing that this issue extended across frontline industries, where managing physical workforces was a major bottleneck, they decided to act. Akash has experience in the banking, media, and robotics sectors and he shares more about his journey as well as how Tendrel unlocks the next stage of industrial innovation.
What’s Tendrel’s North Star?
Our North Star is to be the underlying toolkit for manual industries to operate with high precision, offering greater visibility, predictability, and profitability. Whether you're an independent mom-and-pop shop or a multi-site enterprise still relying on pen and paper, we want you to manage your operations as efficiently as Amazon does, where most of our team comes from.
What inspired you to build Tendrel?
Candidly, I never thought or wanted to become a founder. The reason Tendrel exists is because lightning struck twice. First, I experienced this massive problem that no one was building for, these analog but foundational industries that were just left on the sidelines. And secondly, I met my co-founder, Mark, who saw the world the way that I did. He's a brilliant technical architect and highly complementary to my own skill set. There was that magic of finding just the right person at just the right time, where you're willing to take that leap.
Who are Tendrel’s target customers and how do you inspire “customer love”?
Our customers are those managing hourly, frontline workforces typically ranging from 20 to 200 workers per site and doing dozens of types of tasks. These are often companies still using analog processes like clipboards and punch cards, so there’s no actionable data on critical functions. Customers love us because we empower them with digital tooling but prioritize simplicity and usability. They don’t have to think about us; we make their lives easier without them even noticing.
Tell us about a recent milestone Tendrel crushed.
We just developed our first self-service module, allowing companies to sign up and onboard with Tendrel in less than an hour, with data flowing by the end of the day. This transition from a white-glove deployments to a self-service model is crucial for enabling our customers to scale frictionlessly and cost-effectively.
What’s on the horizon for Tendrel?
In the near-term, we're focused on building more self-service modules that address specific pain points in the industry: real-time asset tracking, dynamic checklists, smart facility management. The next step is inviting external developers to build on our platform, using our APIs to create targeted solutions for these frontline sectors. Then you begin to see how this evolves into an open ecosystem spanning the future of manual work; if you’re interested in building as a tech partner, reach out to me to join our pilot program.
Any advice for other founders?
Make decisions 20% faster than you're comfortable with and find a hobby that takes 100% focus. As a founder, the moments where work isn’t occupying some part of your mind are few and far between, so have an outlet that is so absorbing that you don’t allow work to creep into the foreground or background of your thoughts. For me personally, my fiancé and I train in krav maga, jiu-jitsu, and boxing three times a week, which is certainly one way to be present in the moment.
Check out Akash with Charles Baron on the Venture Everywhere podcast: Harvesting Technology, Listen now on Apple & Spotify and listen to all our past episodes here!
