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Bizongo thrives to support tech-enabled Indian businesses and be the ‘operating system’ for the Indian SME. The brand has grown massively from 996 manufacturers onboard at inception to 7504 today
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Bizongo was co-founded in 2015 by Sachin Agrawal, Aniket Deb and Ankit Tomar with a vision to enable Indian businesses with technology, and build a better, more connected, sustainable world. There are 16mn SMEs in India, and they plan to enable all of them to become more efficient, increase manufacturing capacity, exports and contribute to the economy.
“The company digitises the existing supply chain ecosystem, does not replace it. This is the hard bit to solve, and we’ve done the legwork to execute it. The added value to the customer is complete Supply Chain Automation (SCA), Digital Vendor Management (DVM) and Supply Chain Financing (SCF)”, said Agarwal.
Back to the drawing board
When Bizongo started, it was a B2B marketplace for chemicals and polymers. The founders saw an inefficient marketplace existed and they quickly realised the opportunity. Around 2016, the leaders realised that this was not a sustainable path to scale and decided to pursue the packaging (non-commodity) path. “This was a tough decision; we gave up 95 per cent of our revenue to pivot for a more sustainable path, and it worked,” said Sachin Agrawal. The company is backed by leading investors such as Tiger Global, Chiratae Ventures, Schroder Adveq, CDC Investment Works, AddVentures by SCG, BCap Group, IFC, and Accel.
Bizongo has gone from an e-commerce company to a platform. The vision has remained constant, it has refined the original offering to add efficiency and value end-to-end, but in a different way. The brand has scaled and added new services such as Supply Chain Financing (SCF), providing more impetus for suppliers and customers to jump on-board. Form chemicals, to packaging, to being the operating system for SMEs, they have handled the challenges ably.
Larger Goals
One Bizongo is a recently launched unified platform that addresses end-to-end daily commerce needs of MSMEs. This includes vendor management solutions, supply chain financing solutions with NBFC partners, and an e-bidding platform apart from a host of other offering that will further add efficiencies to the chain.
Sachin Agrawal is highly optimistic in order to achieve the next mark of success within a timeline. He said that Bizongo is focused on revenue; the valuation will come. “We would like to be a $1bn revenue co soon; we are at US$ 715mn as on March 2022, and on track to US$ 2.5bn by 2023. Our success has been based on our foundational principles: being tech-first, and people-first. We’ve helped solve real problems for businesses and opened up new opportunities for them,” he said. They believe in growing profitably.