Most unicorns are from the B2C segment, but Rahul Garg decided to giving manufactuing a filip by building an industrial goods platform to help enterprises. And in six years, he's built Moglix into a unicorn—his third one
Image: Madhu Kapparath
In early April, Rahul Garg, founder and CEO of Moglix, sensed an oncoming storm. He knew India was headed for trouble.
Around him, an uncle and a 36-year-old cousin had passed away due to Covid-19. “That’s when I knew that s*** had hit the fan,” Garg tells Forbes India over a Zoom call. Back then, India’s seven-day moving average for Covid-19 cases was swelling up quickly and had crossed 200,000 cases a day. In contrast, that number had stood at less than 25,000 cases a day in mid-March. In Delhi, where Garg lives, the alarm bells had been sounded as the national capital was gasping for oxygen even as hospitals ran short of beds, exposing serious inadequacies in India’s health care infrastructure.
“Each one of us has lost someone close to us, and it’s been very painful,” says Garg. “When you lose people so young, it is extremely tough. We knew we had to act. I was getting so many calls for oxygen concentrators and beds.” Much of those requests came his way largely because his six-year-old startup, Moglix, was instrumental in ramping up PPE kits and N95 masks across the country during the first wave of Covid-19 in 2020. “We work with the largest manufacturing houses, and the first thing we did was to go after fixing the oxygen problem this time,” he says.
Over the next few weeks in April, Garg and his team at Moglix began working with manufacturers of oxygen concentrators in India, while also sending charter flights to China and Germany to procure the concentrators. Since then, the company has procured some 6,000 oxygen concentrators, which Moglix has been selling to corporate and industrial houses in India. They, in turn, have been giving them to their employees on a group-sharing model, based on a template developed by Garg and Moglix.
“We have probably touched half a million lives through oxygen concentrators,” says Garg. Once a concentrator is purchased, employees can use it on a rotational basis, ensuring its availability, especially at a time when there was a severe shortage. “We had created a template on sanitisation, delivery norms, and the standards of operating procedure for the concentrators.”
(This story appears in the 18 June, 2021 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)