How Bizongo plans to organize the $170 billion chemicals and plastics market
Started by three former IITians, Ankit Tomar, Aniket Deb and Sachin Agrawal in October 2014, Bizongo is an innovative online B2B marketplace based in Powai, Mumbai.
Bizongo aims to become a one-stop solution for all business interaction and transaction. With the advent of technology in India, there is a burning need for a marketplace which can provide a complete experience of selecting the right product, seamless communication between buyer/seller and secure transactions. Bizongo plans to bridge this gap.
Currently, this bootstrapped startup is focused on selling products across the plastics/chemicals industry verticals. Business on the Go refers to their mission of bringing Indian SMEs, manufacturers, dealers online and make them buy and sell ‘on the go’ through minimal effort.
The Indian B2B segment is a huge $400 B which is further poised to increase to $700 B by 2020. Bizongo plans to start by organising the $170 B huge plastics/chemicals market. They recently launched the web platform and in a few days have seen an overwhelming response; a steady stream of over 300 visits a day and have already seen the first set of orders take place through this platform.
The team
Co-Founding the team of Bizongo consists of three distinctly different people possessing dynamic skillsets which ultimately blend extremely well. Ankit Tomar (ex IIT Delhi) is a techie at heart with an insatiable desire to implement revolutionary technology based solutions for businesses. He was involved in developing the Android version of Microsoft’s flagship product MS Excel and hopes to apply his technical acumen in making a B2B portal offering end-to-end solutions to connect businesses to each other.
Aniket Deb (ex IIT Bombay) is imaginative, innovative and a risk taker. He worked as a consultant at Opera Solutions before shifting to Housing.com to get a feel of the start-up environment. The consulting and startup experience together provided him with the ability to deal with clients and understand the nuances of how a startup functions.
Sachin Agrawal (ex IIT Bombay) is a visionary who likes to implement solutions using a hands-on approach. Having been involved in a financial technology firm, Gravitas, as a Risk Manager he has grasped the concepts of finance well and aspires to remove the problem of Late Payments from the B2B ecosystem.
The motivation
Bizongo was started because the founding team could see a lot of loopholes in the way in which Indian businesses currently trade. There is not a shadow of doubt that bringing SMEs online would only increase the volume of trade in the long run. They investigated all the current players in the B2B e-commerce space and found that they were hardly taking measures to genuinely solve problems. The team went a step ahead and wants to solve these problems through the use of superior product and a unique approach. Hence Bizongo was born.
Initial days: Why the plastics/chemical industry?
There are over 2000+ products currently listed on the platform. They belong to product categories like Construction Chemicals, Paints, Material Handling, Disposable Plastics, and Plastics raw materials etc. Team Bizongo decided to start by consolidating the huge chemicals/plastics market. Thirty percent of the $170 B chemicals/plastics market and 50% of the 70,000 chemical manufacturers is based out of the Bombay/Gujarat region and being based out of Mumbai it made sense for them to attach this unorganized yet lucrative market at the start.
Others in this space
Their direct competitors include companies like Tolexo.com which is an IndiaMART subsidiary and startups like IndustryBuying.com. Both Tolexo and IndustryBuying deal in industrial machinery and hardware tools. Bizongo on the other hand allows chemicals and plastic products to be bought through the platform. “We allow the buyer and seller to negotiate through the use of quotations. Our customers have the luxury of using a built-in quotation generator and messaging tool for negotiation and communication. Both our competitors allow the option of direct buying only and there is no further negotiation possible on the product pricing,” say the founders.
Future plans
The Bizongo team currently consists of 13 full time people spread across verticals like Sales, Operations, Marketing, Technology and Design. “Our future plans will entail establishing a strong foothold as the numero uno B2B e-commerce player in the plastics/chemicals verticals. We will also focus on expanding our team size to include more people especially in the Sales and Marketing domains which will help us steadily expand and aggregate both supply/demand in our chosen product categories,” they add.