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

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.

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)