B2B marketplace OfBusiness raises $11 mn from Zodius Capital, Matrix Partners

Online business-to-business (B2B) marketplace OfBusiness has raised $11.1 million (around Rs 75 crore) in its Series B round of funding, led by Zodius Technology Opportunities Fund, it said in a statement.

Existing investor Matrix Partners and angel investors also participated in the round.

The Gurgaon-based company raised $5 million (Rs 34.2 crore) in Series A funding led by Matrix Partners India in February earlier this year. Angel investors Apoorva Patni, Bhavish Aggarwal, Pranay Chulet, Prashant Malik, Rohit M A and Sumesh Menon also participated the round.

The latest infusion of funds takes the total capital raised by the company to over Rs 100 crore. Ofbusiness plans to expand its footprint to cover over 30 clusters and introduce more product lines like consumables.

"Our initial focus has been to build technology that makes us, the buyers and suppliers efficient in commerce and related services. With this raise, we intend to further deepen the presence of technology among SMEs," Bhuvan Gupta, co-founder and chief technology officer at OfBusiness said in the press note.

OfBusiness, run by OFB Tech Pvt Ltd, was founded in 2015 by Asish Mohapatra (a former ITC and McKinsey executive), Gupta (previously vice president of engineering at Snapdeal), Ruchi Kalra (a former partner at McKinsey), Srinath Ramakkrushnan (earlier with ITC), Nitin Jain (a former RBS executive) and Chandranshu (earlier with Centhrix Technologies and Hike Ezee).

Through its tech-enabled platform, the startup caters to the small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), offering them commerce, credit and logistics services. The startups offers SMEs raw materials in construction and manufacturing. It is currently present in 10 industrial and construction clusters across India. Going forward, the firm aims to derive its growth from its financial services subsidiary, which will be headed by co-founder Ruchi Kalra.

Earlier this year in March, Zodius Capital had raised a follow-on fund of around $35-$40 million (approximately Rs 266 crore) to invest in niche e-commerce, fintech and business services startups. This fund is an extension of the $110 million Zodius Technology Fund raised in May 2015. From this fund, Zodius has invested in firms such as grocery startup Big Basket, online furniture firm PepperFry, online lingerie store, Zivame and digital video startup Culture Machine. The firm made the first close of its Zodius Technology Opportunities fund at $30 million.

B2B marketplaces have attracted a lot of investor interest lately.

In November, business-to-business (B2B) marketplace Udaan.com, founded by former Flipkart employees Amod Malviya, Sujeet Kumar and Vaibhav Gupta, raised early stage investment from Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Moglix, a B2B e-commerce company specialising in procurement of industrial products and run by MOGLILABS Pvt. Ltd, raised Rs 28 crore ($4.2 million) in a Series A round of funding led by Accel Partners, along with Jungle Ventures and SeedPlus in October.

Earlier this year, Kalaari Capital and SAIF Partners-backed Industrybuying.com raised 18 million (Rs 12 crore) in debt financing from venture debt provider Trifecta Capital.

In October, Bizongo raised an undisclosed amount in seed funding from Accel Partners.

Another venture in this space is Tolexo, part of IndiaMART InterMESH Ltd, which runs an online B2B platform for small and medium businesses connecting them with global buyers. Indiamart had raised funds in a Series C round in March this year led by Amadeus Capital.

Global e-commerce players Amazon and Alibaba too have businesses in the B2B space. Three years ago, Amazon launched its wholesale e-commerce property AmazonSupply. This came two years after Alibaba launched a new site for B2B e-commerce under 1688.com.