There are very few organizations in the country right now which are looking at SME space and looking to solve the issues that these enterprises face from procurement of raw material to obtaining credit lines and loans. One such company is the newest entry in the Indian unicorn startup club – Ofbusiness.
OfBusiness, located in Gurgaon, India, was founded in January 2016 and is a technology-enabled platform that enables raw material procurement and financing in B2B marketplaces with an emphasis on the manufacturing and infrastructure industries. It allows B2B commerce on its platform to assist clients by providing quality products at affordable rates while sticking to their timelines through online and offline assistance.
With its product fulfillment engine, OfBusiness intends to serve as a single point of contact for SMEs to get secured and unsecured credit lines for the cost-effective acquisition of products. These items might range from raw materials such as steel and cement to polymers and solar equipment.
The team
The company was co-founded by eight persons – Vasant Sridhar, Dhaval Radia, Bhuvan Gupta, Ruchi Kalra, Asish Mohapatra, Chandranshu, Nitin Jain, and Biswajit Mishra – who graduated from IIT and ISB and are some of the best Chartered Accountants in the country. They have cumulative job experience with businesses such as McKinsey, Religare, Royal Bank of Scotland, ITC, and Snapdeal.
As CEO, Asish oversees general operations at OfBusiness and strives to strengthen the organization’s structure. He attended IIT Kharagpur and ISB Hyderabad before joining ITC in 2002 as an Operations Manager in Supply Chain and Manufacturing.
Business Model – How Ofbusiness Works
OfBusiness provides SMEs with institutional finance in form of both secured and unsecured finance. They accomplish this by aggregating numerous raw materials, obtaining financing from local distributors and financiers, and then passing on the majority of the aggregation advantages to the SME, such as bulk discounts from manufacturers.
OfBusiness provides credit lines to SMEs for a variety of raw materials such as industrial steel (structures, plates, and coils), electrical products, cement, bulk polymers, chemicals, construction materials, and solar systems.
The selected raw materials that SMEs throughout clusters order directly to the manufacturer are subsequently aggregated via OfBusiness, resulting in channel efficiencies. The majority of the margin created by these efficiencies is passed on to the SME. OfBusiness’s typical credit limit ranges from Rs 30 lakh for unsecured credit lines to Rs 80 lakh for secured credit lines.
While OfBusiness provides loan lines in a variety of categories, the startup is presently focused on two main SME sectors of the Indian economy: metal and polymer manufacturing (particularly in auto, power, capital goods, and medicine) and infrastructure.
OfBusiness underwrites loans by analysing not just the SME’s financial data, which is sometimes insufficient, but also numerous additional alternate data sources of SME activities, which are supplied by the SME community of buyers and sellers.
Bidassist and SME Assist
The company also offers two software-as-a-service (SaaS) products: Bidassist, a marketing platform with over 2.4 million users, and SME Assist, a business operating system for small and medium-sized businesses.Bidassist has more than quadrupled its yearly growth and is self-sustaining.
By September 2021, OfBusiness hopes to have crossed the $1.1 billion revenue run rate threshold in its e-commerce sector.
Successful in garnering the trust of investors
OfBusiness collects a lot of data on the SMEs, thanks to its fulfilment plus funding approach. The firm understands the SME’s purchase and payment patterns, suppliers with which it works, and payments from its key customers, gaining a better understanding of the SME’s operational and current financial health.
Considering the scalability and the confidence of the startup, Ofbusiness has been largely successful in garnering the trust of investors which is quite evident by the investors in the startup’s kitty which include the likes of Falcon Edge, Matrix Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, Zodius and latest in the list is SoftBank from which it has recently raised $160 million in equity funding led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2, at a valuation of $1.5 billion, making it the latest entrant to India’s growing list of unicorns.
Also Read about: Rivigo – The Unicorn Startup ‘Making Logistics Human’
Future and the way forward
With more than 42 million SMEs in India and a large number of them underserved, Ofbusiness is set to make inroads in these SMEs with full throttle and further its growth path.
The startup expects to support the project of SMEs over its entire lifespan. The sole characteristic that should remain at the heart of OfBusiness is that all funding will be done through the provision of raw materials aggregated by OfBusiness.
With the kind of scope and industry Ofbusiness is catering, the only way is up and up and up!
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