Indian business-to-business (B2B) start-up Bijnis headquartered in New Delhi, has raised $30 million in a Series B financing round led by Westbridge Capital.
The round also included participation from existing investors InfoEdge, Matrix Partners India, Sequoia Capital India, and Waterbridge Ventures.
According to the startup, the proceeds from the round would be utilized towards the growth of its 5000-strong customer base (which comprises retailers and manufacturers), product development for factory management, expanding the technology team, and the creation of more efficient tools to help manufacturers manage their operations and supply chains better.
The six-year-old Bijnis, founded by Siddharth Vij, Siddharth Rastogi, Shubham Agarwal, and Chaitanya Rathi, connects small, medium, and large manufacturers in the fashion, footwear, and lifestyle sectors with retailers and helps them build their own distribution channels. It builds digital factory profiles and digitizes factories in order to make them smarter, faster, and cost-effective, in order to encourage the growth and expansion of the business. It also helps them manage logistics and payments (by partnering with big names in the game) and procuring raw materials directly.
“(Bijnis seeks) to take factories to the world by digitizing and building a globally integrated network of manufacturers on one platform. Our simple and scalable operating systems help manufacturers to improve overall efficiency as they run capacities at optimum levels,” Bijnis CEO Vij said
Bijnis’ work shines all the more bright because it is aiming to solve one of the biggest problems prevalent in modern India. Most factories in the country have not digitized and continue to mostly work offline and depend on middlemen, thus lagging behind as their competitors surge forward. Bijnis is aiming to rectify this problem and remove the middlemen, and while it has a long way to go, it has shown us the way.
The pandemic highlighted the necessity of the digitization of factories, and Bijnis’ efforts yielded rewards as the start-up carved a niche for itself as the B2B platform of choice in the fashion segment. It has onboarded with over 1,00,000 retailers so far. It aims to rope in 20,000 manufacturers and 1 million retailers within the next two years.
“The founding team has very strong category understanding given their family background in manufacturing and that has enabled them to build a compelling proposition for manufacturers and retailers in the fashion and lifestyle categories,” said Sandeep Singhal, partner at Westbridge Capital, in a statement.
