Manufacturing tech startup Moglix raises $12 mn from IFC and others

A Noida-based business-to-business (B2B) marketplace Moglix has raised $12 million Series B from IFC (International Finance Corporation, a wing of World bank) and Rocketship.vc, a San Francisco-based venture fund.

Existing investors of Moglix, including Accel Partners, Jungle Ventures, former vice-president of Twitter Shailesh Rao, and Venture Highway also participated in the round.

According to a report by ET, the proceeds will be utilised by the company to grow its geographical presence in three new North Indian cities over the next six months.

Moglix, a B2B online platform which retails industrial products such as MRO’s (Maintenance repair and operations), power tools, fasteners, electrical devices, industrial lubricants and lists products from 1 lakh small and medium enterprises and serves the digital procurement needs of over 200 large enterprises such as Havell's, India Forge and others.

Founded in August 2015 by Rahul Garg, Moglix had previously raised seed and series A funding of about $6 million. The platform offers a wide assortment of hardware tools to businesses engaged in manufacturing and has five warehouses across NCR, Pune and Chennai.

Moglix currently specializes in B2B procurement, maintenance, repair and overhaul of industrial products such as fasteners and industrial electricals and has tied up with wholesale dealers in markets such as Delhi, Faridabad, Gujarat besides partnering with Chinese and Taiwanese suppliers.

Backed by Ratan Tata -Moglix aims to provide product discovery, price negotiation, logistics, and escrow capabilities to procurement heads and contractors in manufacturing environments.

Commenting on funding said Rahul Garg, founder of Moglix said to ET, “Close to 70% of our business revenue is focussed on mid-to-large enterprises. We will also invest in our software product or SaaS platform through which enterprises can fulfill digital procurement and our commerce engine. We also launched our GST solution `Green GST' for SMEs and enterprises to help them become compliant recently and are not looking at it as a revenue stream yet.“

Garg also added that, Moglix has products from over 2,000 brands from about 5,000 sellers and the capability to deliver to 25,000 pin codes.

Since the change in FDI policy, the scope for manufacturing startup is widening and players like Power2SME, Industrybuying, Amazon, Tolexo, Omnikart and others will play a huge role to create a competitive market in this space.