Bizongo scales to $150 mn in annualised revenue, nears profitability

Bizongo, a tech-enabled B2B e-commerce platform for customised goods, is set to turn profitable as it achieves $150 million in annualized revenue. The company’s topline grew by 5X as compared to its pre-pandemic levels. Bizongo aims to clock $500 million annualised revenue by FY22-23.

The remarkable growth comes on the back of Bizongo offering its proprietary platform for replenishing and supplying more than 10 million Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) for healthcare workers and launching a new vertical in textiles and apparel, which contributes 40 per cent to the overall business. The packaging business noted a 240 per cent growth with increased demand from healthcare, consumer staples, and discretionary industries.

“From early on in our journey, positive unit economics has been a testimony of the successful business model that we have created,” said Sachin Agrawal, co-founder, Bizongo. “Over the last couple of years, Bizongo has made its operating model inventory-free as it further strengthens the capital efficiency of the business. As a co-founder, I am extremely proud that the team has demonstrated tremendous grit and resilience through the past year and is now inches away from EBITDA profitability.”

The Series C company is also expanding into pharma and healthcare verticals and has started servicing international customers and markets. This growth trajectory strengthens the company’s vision of becoming a global B2B e-commerce leader in the customised goods segment.

The overall market size of domestic customised goods, ranging from packaging, textiles, apparel, speciality chemicals, and other contract manufactured products, is estimated to be $500 billion, with more than 10 per cent margin potential for digital aggregators. Currently, the space is fragmented and unorganised, with challenges arising from the higher total cost of ownership (TCO), manual processes, offline catalogue and artwork management, ad-hoc vendor engagement, inaccurate purchase planning, high inventory, loss of sales, and delayed payments to vendor partners.

Bizongo brings a tech-first strategy against a trade-first approach through digital vendor management, supply chain automation, and supply chain financing. The company digitally transforms the vendor ecosystem and integrates it with customer’s end-to-end supply chain processes to deliver agility and transparency across the entire value chain. This significantly improves the go-to-market speed, top line, bottom line, and operational efficiency of the enterprises.

Bizongo is backed by investors such as Schroder Adveq, CDC Investment, AddVentures, Chiratae Ventures, IFC, Accel and B Capital Group, a venture capital firm co-founded by Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin.

“The full-stack approach with an asset-light operating model is what makes it truly scalable for Bizongo,” said Ranjith Menon, partner and executive director at Chiratae Ventures, an investor in Bizongo. “In addition, the company has generated positive cash flow from operations for the past three-quarters, a feat rarely achieved in the B2B e-commerce space.”

With all this, Menon said Bizongo has created a solid foundation to accelerate growth further and consolidate its market leadership in such a large and untapped market.

Mumbai-based Bizongo was founded in 2015 by IIT graduates, Aniket Deb, Sachin Agrawal, and Ankit Tomar. With a monthly supply capacity of over 2-million tonnes, the platform has helped deliver more than 860-million packages using its proprietary digital platforms.

Bizongo recently closed its Series C funding of $51 million and appointed Manish Choksi, Vice Chairman, Asian Paints, as a Board Advisor to build digitally integrated global supply chains and drive market expansion.

Bizongo plans to hire an additional workforce of 50-60 people in the next few months across tech, sales, finance, and customer success. The company has partnered with more than 15 leading banks and financial institutions to facilitate early payment to its customer’s vendors. It has also launched a state-of-the-art live price discovery and bidding platform to provide access to both customers and vendors in the ecosystem. Bizongo services more than 100 enterprise customers in e-commerce, retail, FMCG, auto ancillary, pharmaceuticals, textiles, and apparel and has a network of over 750 partner manufacturers.