Startup of the month: Bonx

1. Please give us a brief company description of Bonx.

Bonx is building the new Europe and then world leader in mid-market manufacturing ERP. By building an interface that Bonx teams and users can customize easily, we can reach the majority of the manufacturing market and enable 10x deployment speed and user experience. Bonx focuses on Operations (supply chain and manufacturing tasks) and integrates to best-of-breed finance and CRM softwares. 

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2. Tell us a bit about the founding story of Bonx. When and how was Bonx born?

Co-founded in November 2022 by Rémi Beges and Alexandre Barroux within OSS Ventures, a startup studio devoted to software for industrials, Bonx benefited from direct access to feedback from many users and key players in the manufacturing sector early in the process, including Décathlon’s supplier network, which continues to be a partner to this day. Before Bonx, Rémi had built 2 ERPs from scratch in his previous companies and understood perfectly the lack of customisation of traditional ERPs. On his side, Alexandre had built 8 manufacturing SaaS startups within OSS Ventures and was amazed how much on each project he worked on, the ERP was always a pain for small and mid-market companies. Together we came up with the idea of a fully customizable platform that not only empowers businesses to take control of their operations but also adapts in real-time to their evolving needs. Bonx achieves this using LLMs to provide a no-code interface that accelerates both implementation and customization efforts.

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3. Who are the people behind Bonx? Tell us about the founders and initiators of Bonx and what motivates them.

Rémi (CTO) has a Phd in electronics and has been programming since he was a kid. He is strongly driven by solving complicated problems, especially when those are the problems of operational people: humans doing real, manual work that create the things we use on a daily basis. Alexandre (CEO) spent his youth doing music and not doing his homeworks. He is a creative and business person, passionate about building great businesses with products and go-to-markets that are exaggeratedly ambitious and scalable. ‍

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4. Who are typical customers for Bonx? Which problems do you solve for them, and what’s usually their most significant pain point?

Bonx sells to manufacturing SMBs (20 to 300 FTEs). That means companies that perform some kind of transformation in a factory or at the factories of their subcontractors. Traditional ERPs often fail in three critical areas— 1/ they lack the flexibility to grow with the business, 2/ they suffer from daunting, lengthy deployment times and 3/ they converged to a “does everything but nothing well” and a closed architecture that makes them very difficult to integrate with. Bonx allows the following 1/ users to deeply customize their platform without the need for IT skills. This goes from changing a colour on a tag to the creation of complex processes. 2/ SMBs can deploy in 1 to 4 months, depending on the company size 3/ Bonx focuses on “operations” and designed the platform to be very easy to connect to the financial ERPs and CRM solutions of their clients. 

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‍5. How do you usually integrate your solution into your customers' existing operations and IT infrastructure? What is needed from their side also in terms of capacity and how long does it usually take?

Most of the time, our client already uses an accounting / finance solution (Pennylane is the big one in France). We connect to this solution to get quotes that then become orders in Bonx. ‍

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6. ERP is for sure not everyone’s favorite topic and the idea of ERP systems is not new. What is it that sets Bonx apart in a competitive market and what is it  that you do differently?

1/ We only focus on operations, which allows us to have much more depth on supply chain and manufacturing features 2/ the no-code toolbox allows us to build in hours/days some industry-specific processes that the typical ERP would build in months or years of integration. 3/ We strongly think that the “bundle” of 2-3 solutions (e.g. CRM + Finance ERP + Operations ERP) will be the standard architecture in 10 years. We are uniquely positioned for that. 4/ because it matters for industrial operators and managers: we just have MUCH better UX/UI. ‍

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7. Can you potentially share a customer success story where you succeeded in solving one of the challenges described above or generally enabled digitization in the manufacturing industry?

Certainly! One of our standout customer success stories involves Recyc Matelas Europe, the European leader in the mattress recycling industry. They were facing significant challenges with their existing spreadsheet-based system, which struggled to provide adequate traceability, real-time visibility, and efficient management of their intense logistics flows. These issues are critical in the recycling sector, where the ability to track and manage materials from collection to transformation into new raw materials is essential.Recyc Matelas was dealing with inefficiencies like double data entries, poor scheduling coordination, and an overall lack of real-time data integration. This not only hampered their productivity but also posed risks to their environmental compliance and profitability.When Recyc Matelas turned to Bonx, we were able to seamlessly integrate our ERP with their existing systems, particularly their accounting software and weighing tool (which is crucial for managing stock and ensuring accurate data capture). Bonx provided real-time synchronization across their supply chain, from suppliers to internal teams, which drastically improved their planning and stock management.As a result, Recyc Matelas saw a 15% increase in their revenue thanks to Bonx, largely due to the productivity gains. They also achieved significant cost reduction.After 6 months of work together, Bonx had already been implemented and used on 4 of their factories. This success story is a testament to how Bonx not only addresses specific industry challenges but also drives significant business growth and operational excellence through digital transformation.

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8. We still see a lot of excel spreadsheets instead of real digital tools - especially in SME. What’s your view and maybe predictions on the tech stack of manufacturing SMEs how do you expect the landscape to change?

Our conviction since the beginning is that, 10 years from now, the vast majority of world SMBs will have segmented the 4 fields traditionally attributed to ERPs (in the 1980s vision): HR, CRM, Finance and Supply Chain. We already see that, in most of these fields, traditional ERPs have already been disrupted: SalesForce seized the market for CRM (client resource planning). Workday became the major player in HR (human resource planning). Some accounting tools are kicking old ERPs out from the deals (Pennylane in France, QuickBooks in the US). And Bonx’s vision is to become the new leader for “operations” (supply chain and manufacturing).    ‍‍

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9. How do you see the future of Bonx? How will the product and the company evolve and what’s your overall vision for Bonx?‍

‍The vision is very simple: Bonx is building the new European and then world leader in mid-market manufacturing ERP. That means we want to be the go-to solution worldwide for manufacturing companies to manage their operations. Although there is no physical limit to the size of companies we can address, we want to stay focused on solving the unique challenges of growing, below-2000 FTEs companies, which need more than anyone our value proposition of fast implementation, modern architecture, and evolution with their activity.