India's OfBusiness Debuts Raw Material Procurement App

Indian B2B platform OfBusiness has launched an app to help small businesses obtain credit and raw materials.

The app lets micro-, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) procure materials, compare prices with vendors across India, handle orders and track shipments, according to a Sunday (Mar. 5) announcement.

OfBusiness will act as a buyer/aggregator, procuring materials and delivering them without asking for collateral, the announcement said. Nitin Jain, co-founder of the unicorn, said the app is designed to streamline the supply chain for micro-companies, which make up the bulk of the MSME ecosystem.

Based in New Dehli, OfBusiness provides raw material sourcing — things like structural steel, polymers, paper and cement — to the manufacturing industry and offers credit to the businesses through its non-banking financial company (NBFC) arm.

OfBusiness was valued at $1.5 billion in a funding round in July 2021 and saw its valuation double to $3 billion following another round two months later. Another cash injection in December brought its valuation to $5 billion.

Last year, the company’s lending division, Oxyzo Financial Services, was valued at $1 billion after raising $200 million in what was reported at the time to be the largest Series A for an Indian startup.

The company’s new effort comes as firms in the steel and chemical industries are working to digitize and modernize B2B trade during uncertain times, as PYMNTS wrote in October 2022.

“All that a platform really is doing is carrying out the wishes of its users — we’re a big communication pipeline, to some degree, to help the buyers and the sellers agree,” Bryzos CEO Shep Hickey said in an interview with PYMNTS’ Karen Webster.

Meanwhile, MSMEs continue to struggle to access the same sort of trade financing as their larger peers, as PYMNTS noted recently in a conversation with Sandra Nolasco, CEO at Madrid-based trade finance platform Twinco Capital.

She said the problem comes down to the way traditional lenders assess creditworthiness, as standard lending models in the space limit growth because “your credit is capped by … by your balance sheet.”

“That means that even if you’re a good supplier and [the buyer] wants to triple the order, for example, they can’t because you don’t have enough money to buy the raw materials,” Nolasco told PYMNTS.