Our Story

AI is walking, flying, and driving into the physical world. Humanoids, robotaxis, drones and new types of autonomous machines are multiplying faster than anyone can count. Each machine is built from thousands of discrete components. Sourcing a single part still means flying to trade shows, making hundreds of cold calls, and scrolling distributor sites for hours. Supplier quotes come back in a dozen formats and languages, get re-keyed by hand into spreadsheets, and spawn 100+ email threads just to know if that one part lands on the manufacturing floor on time.

It’s 2026, and the most important machines of the next decade, across aerospace, automotive, robotics, electronics, semiconductors, and beyond, are still procured the same way they were before the internet.

We lived and breathed this exact frustration firsthand, running hardware supply chains at Apple, Dell, and Peloton. We built AI systems that reason over exactly this kind of messy and unstructured data. We met at Stanford University, and as we watched physical AI take shape around us, one question kept pulling us back: what if hardware could be sourced at software speed? That question became Syntro, the first agentic procurement platform built for the realities of modern hardware manufacturing.

Manufacturers pour $8 trillion into components and materials every year, and none of it moves through tools built for this scale. Legacy systems force a trade-off between speed, control, and cost. They’re either indirect procurement systems repurposed for hardware, or direct-procurement tools built for a pace that no longer matches how hardware actually gets built. Syntro doesn’t force that trade-off. From the first prototype to mass production, our agents discover every qualified supplier instantly, select the right one against supplier, market, and internal data, issue POs and track each supplier account 24/7, and adapt the moment a BOM shifts or a supplier falters. What used to live in one buyer’s head now lives in a system that gets smarter with every quote, every PO, every part revision.

This is where we start, but the opportunity is bigger than any one workflow. We believe the next five years will bring more new hardware into the world than the last fifty combined. And so...

Our mission is to power the world’s hardware supply chains

Join the mission

Meet the founders

Karan Agrawal

CEO & Co-Founder

Rohit Gupta

COO & Co-Founder

Neha Balamurugan

CTO & Co-Founder

Karan Agrawal

CEO & Co-Founder

Karan Agrawal is the Co-Founder and CEO of Syntro.

Karan has spent the last decade inside different hardware supply chains across the world, seeing the inefficiencies from every seat at the table. In college, that meant a summer on the engine manufacturing floor at Cummins in rural Indiana, drafting supply chain policy for the South African government in Johannesburg and leading a national capstone team to build inventory optimization models that cut Cisco’s logistics costs drastically.

He started his career at Dell building digital supply chain planning and procurement products that ran the company’s PC and server supply chains. Two years in, at the height of COVID in 2021, Karan cold-emailed his way into Peloton and landed in the middle of one of the most dramatic supply chain stories in recent memory: he first led initiatives to scale global manufacturing and procurement as demand exploded and then rightsized that same footprint as demand normalized. Watching both extremes up close showed him how much of hardware’s supply chain infrastructure still runs on spreadsheets, faxes, and tribal knowledge, built for a world that moves far slower than the one modern hardware manufacturing necessitates.

Along the way, Karan built Georgia Tech’s first supply chain club, Toronto’s first grassroots supply chain meetup, and Stanford GSB’s first AI x supply chain conference.

Karan holds an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business and a BS in Industrial Engineering from Georgia Tech. He has been recognized with the Georgia Tech “40 Under 40” and ISM “30 Under 30” awards for his contributions to the supply chain field.

Rohit Gupta

COO & Co-Founder

Rohit Gupta is the Co-Founder and COO of Syntro.

Rohit grew up behind the counter of his family’s retail business, where supply chain was a dominant part of dinner table conversation: inventory challenges, distributor delays, and stock outs were daily occurrences impacting his family’s day to day lives. This early exposure gave him a clear purpose around modernizing the physical economy.

He started his career as a technology and industrials M&A analyst at Lincoln International, running sell-side M&A processes for industrial manufacturers and technology companies. An operator at heart, he moved to Apple’s direct procurement team where he learned from and helped shape the gold standard of supply chain firsthand. Rohit drove various strategic procurement initiatives there during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, including geographic diversification strategies, single source risk mitigation, and E2E supply chain visibility.

When the pandemic created challenges for his family’s business, Rohit stepped in to navigate it through. He served as the Chief Operating Officer for a $25M+ portfolio of retail, restaurant, and real estate establishments, where he drove go-to-market initiatives across e-commerce and brand partnerships to increase sales ~30% and enhanced operational efficiency across purchasing and delivery fulfillment.

Rohit holds an MBA from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business and a BS in Finance and Accounting, summa cum laude, from NYU’s Stern School of Business. For fun, he is a hobbyist DJ and an avid bhangra dancer.

Neha Balamurugan

CTO & Co-Founder

Neha Balamurugan is the Co-Founder and CTO of Syntro.

Neha is a builder who works across the entire stack, from virtual and augmented reality to machine learning to full-stack web. At Arizona State’s Meteor Studio, she led a team of ten developers under the $500M Dreamscape Learn initiative, designing multiplayer VR learning experiences that reached more than 1,500 students, alongside real-time climate visualizations and a multi-user eye-tracking platform for classrooms. She is also an avid builder, with award-winning hacks at TreeHacks and HackMIT.

At Stanford, Neha moved to the frontier of AI. In the Causality in Cognition Lab, she built a benchmark and data-generation pipeline to measure how humans and vision-language models differ in reasoning about the social world, work that became a first-author paper at CVPR 2026.

Her path to Syntro ran directly through its problem space. At the Emerson Collective, she worked as an AI engineer and early-stage investor, building the firm’s software-for-hardware market map and deploying AI tooling inside portfolio companies. Earlier, as Chief of Staff at CheckBook.io, she shipped a RAG-powered assistant that made years of institutional knowledge searchable across the company.

Neha holds an M.S. in Computer Science with a concentration in Artificial Intelligence from Stanford University and a B.S. in Computer Science from Arizona State University, where she ranked first in computer science among 741 graduates. She has been named a Heidelberg Laureate Forum scholar, one of 200 young researchers selected worldwide, and an Accel Leadership Fellow in Stanford’s entrepreneurship program.

Backed by the best

We are fortunate to be backed by venture firms, entrepreneurs and operators behind our generation’s defining software and hardware companies

Institutional investors

Angels

**Aidan Curtis**Partner, Eclipse · ex-GM, Samsara