Industrybuying gets $9M from Kalaari, SAIF & Beenext

Industrybuying.com, an online marketplace for industrial goods, has secured Rs 60 crore ($9 million) in a Series B funding round from Kalaari Capital, existing investor SAIF Partners and Teruhide Sato's Beenext, as per a press statement.

The company plans to use the money to further develop its e-commerce platform, establish a nationwide sales force, increase the vendor base and develop a full suite of digital offerings for B2B brands.

As part of the transaction, Kalaari Capital's Sumit Jain will join the board of New Delhi-based MTech Engineering Pvt Ltd, which runs Industrybuying.com.

"We are excited about B2B e-commerce in India. We have watched Industrybuying.com take the lead in this space and are glad to become a part of its growth journey. We hope to leverage our learnings from B2C e-commerce and apply them to this wave of disruption in the B2B space," said Vani Kola, managing director, Kalaari Capital.

In May, techcircle.in had reported that Industrybuying.com was in talks to raise funding from existing investor SAIF and other VCs. Last year, the company had raised $2 million from SAIF Partners.

Industrybuying.com was co-founded by Rahul and Swati Gupta (siblings) in 2013. Swati is a former Bain & Co employee and has 14 years of management consulting and private equity advisory experience in New York and India. Rahul, an alumnus of Columbia University, was previously associated as a trader with Lehman Brothers.

"We saw large businesses like Grainger.com, Amazon in the US, Alibaba's B2B transaction business 1688.com in China and realised that there was a gap in India; at that time nobody was looking at online B2B models. We also had the advantage of a background in industrial distribution through our family business. We launched the platform in 2013 and since then there has been no looking back," said Swati Gupta, co-founder, Industrybuying.com.

The company works on a zero inventory model. It sources products from vendors and ships to customers who order through the website.

Industrybuying.com claims to have an online catalogue of over 250,000 products that are used in manufacturing, construction, maintenance, services and commercial operations. It counts companies in sectors such as FMCG, hospitality, manufacturing, construction, automotive, pharmaceuticals, services and others as clients.

Another venture in this space is Tolexo.com. Run by Tolexo Online Pvt Ltd, Tolexo is part of IndiaMART InterMESH Ltd, which runs an online B2B platform for small and medium businesses connecting global buyers with suppliers under the brand IndiaMART.

Tolexo was launched in August last year and is aggregating demand from construction, manufacturing, laboratory and hospitality companies, primarily for industrial goods.

Globally, Amazon launched its wholesale e-com property AmazonSupply three years ago. This came two years after Alibaba launched a new site for B2B e-com under 1688.com.

Beenext is a venture capital fund with a corpus of $60 million (approximately Rs 400 crore) targeting investments in early stage companies in India, Southeast Asia, Japan and the US. It is the brainchild of Teruhide Sato, founder and former CEO of Japanese e-commerce operator and investor Beenos Inc (formerly Netprice).