I spent years building software for FMCG businesses — Bizom, Happay, Qoruz, CultureX. Over that time I kept seeing the same thing.
Brands had software. Distributors had software. Retailers had software.
And the market stayed fragmented. Everyone could see their own layer. Nobody could see what was happening across the ecosystem.
At first it looked like the retailer was the problem. Independent retail was being squeezed from every direction — modern trade, e-commerce, quick commerce. So instead of trying to solve it from a software company's side of the desk, we decided to operate a supermarket ourselves.
We opened it in a deliberately difficult location: between D-Marts, Star Bazaar, Reliance Fresh, and e-commerce and quick-commerce fulfilment zones.
The hypothesis was simple. If demand was the problem, nobody would come.
They came. Customers kept walking in, week after week.
That changed the question. It was never whether people wanted to shop at an independent supermarket. It was whether the supermarket could consistently have what they came to buy.
That turned out to be much harder.
A customer would ask for a product, and putting it on the shelf was not a purchase. We had to find the company, get mapped to an ASM, get mapped to a salesman, wait for that salesman's beat, place the order, meet the distributor's minimum order value, and then wait for delivery. Sometimes two days. Often a week or more.
And even while running the store, we frequently could not tell whether a product existed anywhere in the supply chain until we started calling people.
Then we started seeing the same shape everywhere. Stock-outs. Replenishment. Vendor discovery. Working capital. Forecasting. Promotions.
All of it came back to one thing: coordination.
A customer wants something. If the retailer has it, there is a transaction. If the retailer doesn't, that transaction simply happens somewhere else. The retailer is buying with limited visibility. The distributor is planning with limited visibility. The brand is trying to read demand with limited visibility. The customer just moves on.
That is when it clicked.
FMCG did not have a software problem. Software had already reached almost every layer. What was missing was a way for the ecosystem to act on the same commercial reality.
Because every retail transaction already creates information for several people at once. The retailer wants to know what to reorder. The distributor wants to know what to dispatch. The brand wants to know what is actually selling. The consumer wants to know where to buy it again.
One transaction. Four decisions.
Today those four decisions are made in isolation, from four different versions of the same event.
So we started asking a different question: what if every decision began from the same transaction?
That is MarCat.
We are not trying to connect everyone to everyone. We are trying to connect everyone to the transaction.
We start with the independent supermarket, because that is where the transaction is created. The retailer platform is the entry point — but the ambition is larger than another POS, inventory tool or retail SaaS product.
We want the transaction to stop being a record of what happened and start being intelligence for what happens next.
The retailer makes a better decision. That creates a better signal for the distributor. That creates a better understanding for the brand. That improves availability for the consumer. And the next transaction begins with more understanding than the last one.
Transaction → learning → decision → next transaction.
Retail already shares the transaction. It just doesn't share what the transaction means.
Every transaction should become the starting point for the next one.
MarCat — building the infrastructure behind connected commerce.