Private equity-backed Bizongo announced its latest fundraise of $110 million in Series D round led by New York-based Tiger Global Management.
VCCircle reported the development early December.
The series D round had new investments coming from CDC and IFC EAF and saw participation from existing investors BCap, Chiratae Ventures, Schroder Adveq, IFC and Add Ventures by SCG. Manish Choksi, a member of Bizongo’s Advisory Board and the Vice Chairman at Asian Paints, also invested in his personal capacity in the round, the company said in a statement on Monday.
With the latest round, Bizongo’s valuation has soared to $600 million. It issued 10 equity shares and 1,21,510 series D2 compulsorily convertible preference shares (D2CCPS) at Rs 67,890 apiece to 10 subscribers, according to the filings that VCCircle reported as cited above.
The company will deploy the fresh funds in ramping up its business and tech teams to develop a suite of digital services for both sides of the marketplace. It will also invest in nurturing its vendor partnerships and transform over 100 factories into true cloud factories through its proprietary solutions, it added.
“There is a lot of untapped potential in the way Indian businesses can leverage technology to grow and thrive. Bizongo offers solutions across digital vendor management, supply chain automation and supply chain financing to its enterprise customers. It enables them to digitize their entire vendor ecosystem and build integrated and connected supply chain processes…We are now fully geared to sustainably grow the business by at least 300% year-on-year from here on,” said Sachin Agrawal, Co-founder at Bizongo.
Founded in 2015 by three IIT graduates Aniket Deb, Ankit Tomar and Sachin Agrawal, Bizongo is digitizing the massively fragmented B2B segment of made-to-order goods. SmartPaddle Technology Pvt. Ltd. owns and operates a business-to-business platform for packaging materials Bizongo.
The company offers boxes, containers, pouches and bags for industries such as food and hospitality, consumer goods and retail. It has warehouses in Mumbai, Bengaluru and Delhi. Its clients include BigBasket, Nykaa, Swiggy, Delhivery, Teabox and Tata Cliq.
Bizongo also launched India’s first (Internet of Things) IoT-powered ‘cloud factory’ for made-to-order goods. This software-as-a-solution or SaaS-based solution is expected to enable manufacturers to provide their customers with real-time visibility, control, and intelligence across the entire supply chain. This has been successfully piloted with leading pharmaceutical packaging manufacturer, Ansapack, the company added.
Explaining the reason for the investment in Bizongo, John Curtius, Partner at Tiger Global, said, “The market for customized goods is the fastest-growing segment in B2B e-commerce. At a size of $500 billion, this market is vast yet highly fragmented and unorganized. We found Bizongo very unique in the way they have been building a transaction-led platform with a tech-first vs a trade-first mindset. The full-stack approach with an asset-light operating model makes Bizongo stand out as a market leader in this segment.”
Founding General Partner at B Capital, Kabir Narang, said, “We are excited to double down on our investment in Bizongo. It’s great to see the progress of the company since our initial investment a few years back. Bizongo is now a leading tech-enabled online platform that serves as a digital aggregator between a fragmented SME manufacturing base and its customers across e-commerce, FMCG and Healthcare.”
The B2B tech company recorded an 8x growth in its top line from its pre-pandemic scale clocking an ARR of $250 million in November this year. The growth is also associated with a strong unit economics and positive cash flow as the company is now EBITDA profitable. Bizongo has made its operating model inventory-free, further strengthening the capital efficiency of the business, the company stated.
It recently launched an online bidding platform for real-time seller and price discovery, claiming to be a global first in the customised goods categories like packaging, textiles and apparels amongst others. It is also expanding its digital supply chain financing (SCF) platform in partnership with top banks and NBFCs. The SCF platform has already enabled early payments worth over Rs 1,000 crore to more than 1000 SMEs and MSMEs.