B2B e-commerce platform Industrybuying secures Rs 60 Cr funding led by Kalaari Capital

B2B e-commerce platform Industrybuying secures Rs 60 Cr funding led by Kalaari Capital

Thursday September 10, 2015,

3 min Read

After raising its Series A in February this year, Industrial e-commerce platform Industrybuying has snapped up Rs 60 crore in Series B funding. This round is led by Kalaari Capital, with participation from SAIF Partners and BEENEXT. Following the round, Sumit Jain of Kalaari Capital has joined the company’s board.


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The company intends to use the funds to:

a) develop its commerce platform,

b) establish nationwide sales force to target businesses throughout India,

c) increase the vendor base and,

d) develop a full suite of digital offerings for B2B brands to sell online.

Earlier this year, Industrybuying had raised $2 million Series A round from SAIF Partners. Rahul Gupta, Co-founder, Industrybuying, said:

B2B is a different model from B2C. The products are of repeat, essential nature, the customer behavior is sticky and building the product catalogue non-trivial. Our objective is to build a scaled and profitable business by focusing on creating a robust technology back-end and a large ecosystem of vendors and service providers that solves the B2B buyer pain points.

Founded by siblings Rohit and Swati Gupta in 2013 -- Industrybuying claims to grow over 100X since SAIF Partners investment. The company’s omni-channel presence includes online e-commerce and offline corporate customers like Motherson Sumi, Havells, RPG, Honeywell, Siemens, Tata Power, Escorts among others.

Rahul is an alumnus of IIT Delhi and Columbia University, and was a Wall Street trader before turning entrepreneur. Swati has studied at NSIT and Carnegie Mellon University and had stint with Bain and Co as a management consultant.

Speaking about thesis behind leading this round,Vani Kola, Managing Director, Kalaari Capital, said:

We hope to leverage our learnings from B2C ecommerce and apply them to this wave of disruption in the B2B space.

YourStory’s take

While we see a slew of players battling for B2C ecommerce crown, we don’t witness much traction in B2B segment. According to some rough industry estimate -- B2B e-commerce is a $500 billion market at its early stages in India. There are 4.8 crore SMEs that need to secure bulk supplies and it’s a much bigger opportunity than B2C e-commerce.

Industrybuying competes with IndiaMart’s backed Tolexo and a few others. With this capital bolster, the company plans to scale fast and build a stronger brand across the country. Globally, Grainger.com, Amazonbusiness in the US, Alibaba’s 1688.com in China are multi billion dollar entitites and on their lines we anticipate two-three sucess from India over the next three years.

 

(Disclaimer: Kalaari Capital is an investor in YourStory Media)