B2B marketplace Moglix gets Flipkart CEO’s backing

Online business-to-business (B2B) industrial goods marketplace Moglix has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Kalyan Krishnamurthy, chief executive officer of homegrown e-commerce giant Flipkart.

This is Krishnamurthy’s first individual investment in the B2B e-commerce sector, Moglix said in a statement.

“Kalyan has played an important role in shaping e-commerce in India and his experience in scaling businesses will serve as a guiding light for us as we execute on our vision to transform B2B commerce and the Indian manufacturing sector using technology and innovation,” Rahul Garg, founder and CEO, Moglix, said in a statement.

The funding comes close on the heels of Moglix’s Series C round of $23 million (Rs 164 crore) that it had raised in December to strengthen its B2B distribution network and supply chain across India and expand into new market segments.

Moglix’s existing investors include venture capital firms Accel, Jungle Ventures and Venture Highway, apart from International Finance Corporation (IFC), the private-sector investment arm of the World Bank. Former Twitter and Google executive Shailesh Rao and venture debt provider InnoVen Capital have also invested in Moglix.

Moglix, operated by Noida-based MOGLILABS Pvt. Ltd, was founded by Rahul Garg in August 2015. Prior to Moglix, Garg worked at Google’s Ad Exchange services division as head of Southeast Asia.

Moglix specialises in procurement of industrial products such as fasteners and industrial electricals, hardware, pneumatics and safety items. The company operates across 12 centres in India and caters to both institutional customers (B2B) and individual customers (B2C) in the manufacturing sector. It focuses on the automotive, metals, mining, and fast-moving consumer durables markets.

It claims to work with about 400 large manufacturing clients and more than 2.5 lakh small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). It also claims to have created a digital supply chain platform of 5,000 SMEs and big suppliers across 25 states in India.

Prior to its Series C funding, Moglix had raised $12 million in its Series B round from IFC and Silicon Valley-based venture capital fund Rocketship.

A number of e-commerce firms in the broader B2B segment have garnered investor interest lately.

Last year, Bengaluru-based B2B agri-marketing platform Ninjacart raised Rs 250 crore (around $35 million) in a Series B funding round led by US-based Accel and Switzerland-based agriculture investor Syngenta Ventures.

In September, Hiveloop Technology Pvt. Ltd, which operates B2B e-commerce platform Udaan, raised $225 million in a Series C funding round from its existing investors DST Global, owned by Israeli-Russian billionaire Yuri Milner, and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

In August, Bengaluru-based ShopX which is a B2B e-commerce platform for small retailers, raised $35 million (Rs 240 crore) from Hong Kong-based Fung Holdings.