The Gurgaon based startup, OfBusiness which works on B2B (Business to Business) dealings instead to B2C (Business to Customer). In India B2B businesses are far away than B2C in online transactions. But OfBusiness managed to raise USD 5 million in first round of funding led by Matrix Partners India. Bhavish Aggarwal, Co-founder & CEO of OLA; Apoorva Patni; many others have backed the company. It must be noted that along with being only a three month old online market place such huge amount is raised by B2B when the numbers are decreasing on the cheques of series A funding.
OfBusiness is a platform for businesses to transact online among themselves. It is currently working in manufacturing and construction sector and planning to enter health care too. It gets most of its business almost 80% from Tier II or Tier III cities i.e. from Small and Medium sized enterprises. It is now active across 10 states. There are other firms too that work on B2B models and are active such as Moglix, IndiaMART, mSupply.com etc. This sector has to fight harder for funds unlike B2C.
“SMEs in India are already using the internet (through Whatsapp) for information sharing and communication. We believe in the OfBusiness vision that these SMEs are ready to transact, beginning in an assisted manner for all their monthly purchases,” said Vikram Vaidyanathan, MD, Matrix India.
OfBusiness has a team of 40 people working hard to assist the business owners in online transactions. Moreover OfBusiness claims to deal mostly with in bulk orders along with an option to provide their own logistics.
OfBusiness is run by OFB Tech Pvt Ltd, was founded in 2015 by Asish Mohapatra (a former ITC and McKinsey executive), Bhuvan Gupta (earlier VP-engineering at Snapdeal and CTO of BSB portal), Ruchi Kalra (earlier a partner in McKinsey), Srinath Ramakkrushnan (earlier with ITC), Nitin Jain (former RBS executive) and Chandranshu (earlier with Centhrix Technologies and Hike Ezee).
“The transaction sizes in B2B commerce have to be very high for the business to be made sustainable. Also, you need to have high repeat materials on your platform. Besides that, creating a robust supply chain which includes finding the right suppliers and a cost-efficient logistics network have been the biggest challenges so far. We’ve been able to work on all these things in a very short period of time,” said Asish Mohapatra, co-founder & CEO OfBusiness.
Founder of Tolexo, Brijesh Aggarwal commented upon the B2B vs. B2C condition in india as, “In the last year or so, multiple B2B commerce players have emerged in the online space which is still in a nascent
stage.Compare that to a market like the US where online B2B has taken over B2C in terms of size.We have transacted with over 2 lakh businesses who have made purchases at least once on our platform. Most of our businesses are from tier II and tier III towns.
B2C Startups are in trend no doubt but the back of economy The commercial businesses must also have a chance to get along. This isnt a case in India where B2C are getting floods of funds inspite of no profits and B2B have to look out for a single Rupee with lots of oppurtunity to earn around. Such initiatives must be supported to withhold the balance and move ahead hand in hand.
Visit Website www.ofbusiness.in
