Moglix Becomes Latest Unicorn After $120-Million Fundraise
Former Google executive’s industrial procurement startup is now valued at over $1 billion.
Moglix completed a funding round catapulting the industrial business-to-business commerce platform into a league of startups valued at more than $1 billion.
The company on Monday raised $120 million in a fresh fundraise led by Falcon Edge Capital and Harvard Management Company, it said in a statement. Existing investors such as Tiger Global, Sequoia Capital India and Venture Highway, too, participated in the round.
With that, Moglix became the latest unicorn among the two dozen such startups minted in the last five months. To put that in perspective, India had a total of seven new unicorns in all of 2020, Bloomberg reported citing market researcher CB Insights. In 2019, it had six.
The fresh capital took the overall funding raised by Moglix to $220 million to date.
“We started six years ago with a firm belief in the untapped potential of the Indian manufacturing sector,” Rahul Garg, founder and chief executive officer at Moglix, and former head of Google’s advertising and strategy for India Southeast Asia and Korea, said in the statement. The firm’s mission, he said, is to enable the creation of a $1-trillion manufacturing economy in India. “Today, as we enter the next stage of our evolution, we feel this financing milestone is a testimony to our journey of innovation and disruption.”
Team Moglix. (Source: Moglix)
Six-year-old Moglix, started by Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur and Indian School of Business alumnus Garg, provides solutions to more than 5 lakh SMEs and 3,000 manufacturing plants across India, Singapore, the U.K. and the U.A.E. It claims to have a supply chain network of more than 16,000 suppliers, over 35 warehouses and logistics infrastructure.
It counts Hero MotoCorp Ltd., Vedanta Ltd., Tata Steel Ltd., Unilever and Air India and NTPC Ltd. as its customers.
“We have studied and tracked Moglix for years, driven by our global experience in investing in online MRO (maintenance repair and operations) platforms,” Navroz D Udwadia, co-founder of Falcon Edge Capital, an investor in Moglix, said in a statement. Its distinctive customer value proposition and return on investments are visible in its customer and revenue retention numbers, Udwadia said. “We believe Moglix is now well poised to scale and we are thrilled to back the company in the next phase of its growth.”