As they impact the SME ecosystem, the co-founders of OfBusiness want to make more money than they did the previous month and keep adding zeroes to their revenues--profitability, growth, and scale, says co-founder Asish Mohapatra
(From left) Asish Mohapatra, Ruchi Kalra, Vasant Sridhar, Nitin Jain and Bhuvan Gupta, co-founders of OfBusiness
Image: Madhu Kapparath
Getting their first round of funding was not an issue for the founders of OfBusiness. The five of them—Nitin Jain, Asish Mohapatra, Vasant Sridhar, Ruchi Kalra and Bhuvan Gupta—had quit high-level corporate jobs to turn to entrepreneurship in 2016 and it was a given that they would come up with a winner.
They wanted to focus on the B2B space and thought nothing of exchanging the streets of downtown London (Jain was with Royal Bank of Scotland) for the lanes of small town India where they set about not just procuring raw material in a tech-enabled manner for small and medium-sized businesses but also providing cheaper credit to the businesses. While there are others who work in these two spaces, OfBusiness’s model of combining the two creates a sticky customer. They added a third layer, BidAssist, where customers can bid for government and private tenders.
“So whoever comes to us—a small or medium-sized business—can get the best price for raw materials, get it delivered on time, get all the advantages of a typical commerce engine, or that a big company gets… it has cheaper credit cost and can also find revenue opportunities,” says Mohapatra.
(This story appears in the 31 December, 2021 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)