Mumbai-based B2B marketplace Bizongo raises $3mn Series A funding from IDG Ventures
B2B packaging marketplace Bizongo today raised $3 million in Series A funding in a round led by IDG Ventures. Existing investors Accel Partners also participated in the round. The startup had raised a seed funding in October last year.
Speaking of his plans with this fund raise, Aniket Deb, Co-founder of Bizongo, says,
The funds will be used to expand our seller base and work towards focusing deeper into spreading pan India demand. We also intend to invest in our supply chain and logistics capabilities. Our platform and our technology products are built with the singular objective of making procurement a hassle-free and seamless process, we plan to invest in our technology team and capabilities as well.
The idea of Bizongo first came to Aniket and Sachin Agrawal at a Starbucks outlet in Hiranandani when they decided to look at simplifying trade for Indian businesses as a whole. They had their eureka moment when they studied the current trade practices in detail.
Once the duo figured out what they wanted to build, they looked for someone with good technical know-how. This was when they found their third partner in Ankit Tomar.
Aniket adds that they are focused on the $17 billion packaging industry in India, which has hardly any organised players. The platform currently focuses on containers, bags, boxes, and pouches, which are frequently used by the retail, FMCG, food and hospitality, and e-commerce industries, among others. The platform also has several custom packaging and branding options.
The team claims to have served more than 3,000 businesses since the company's inception last year. They also intend to partner with large corporates in the retail and manufacturing segment and handle their procurement process end-to-end.
Aniket adds that over 50 percent of their monthly revenue comes from repeat customers. Speaking on this investment, Ranjith Menon, Executive Director, IDG Ventures India, said that packaging forms a rather fundamental part of most businesses.
He adds that there are over 28,000 vendors in India and the supply chain is fragmented, and, thus, when a team was working to build a platform for packaging materials in the country, IDGVI was excited to partner with them.
Prayank Swaroop, Principal, Accel Partners, said in a press statement that since they partnered with Bizongo in mid-2015 in their seed round, the startup has grown a hundredfold and has become a great example of a modern B2B commerce marketplace.
While we see a slew of players battling for the B2C e-commerce crown, we don’t witness much traction in the B2B segment. According to some rough industry estimate, B2B e-commerce is a $500-billion market in its early stages in India. There are 4.8 crore SMEs that need to secure bulk supplies, and that's a much bigger opportunity than B2C e-commerce.
Speaking of their future plans, Aniket adds,
We plan to grow our Procurement Centre product. We currently offer purchase analytics, inventory management and purchase planning capabilities to our buyers; this is where we want our technology team to focus. We also plan to build on a lot of packaging innovation, develop newer categories and offer packaging consultation to our buyers. We want to become the de facto platform for procurement for all our buyers across the major target industries like food processing and consumer goods, restaurant and hospitality, retail and wholesale, manufacturing, e-commerce, and logistics.
