How Moglix Built an Unexpected E-Commerce ‘Unicorn’

India has seen quite a few “unicorn” companies pop up in the last decade or so. These unicorns stretch from social commerce startups like Meesho to tech startups like Gupshup and Cred, and there has been a wide variety in the amount of success each company has experienced.

One of the most successful unicorn startups, however, has been Moglix. Moglix was founded in 2015 by Rahul Garg. A researcher and engineer “passionate about solving hard problems and delivering production quality solutions with a proven track record of converting research to products,” Garg’s vision for the business-to-business industrial products company was always to scale it upwards.

Over nine rounds of funding, Moglix has raised nearly half of a billion US dollars in funding. Based out of Noida, India with headquarters in Singapore and an office in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, the company’s most recent evaluation from Q1 2022 was recorded to be $2.6 billion. 

Moglix sells products in many different arenas. Listed throughout over 30 categories, Moglix boasts 450,000 industry-essential products. Items for sale include household and office goods, electrical and lighting supplies, agriculture and gardening supplies, appliances and utilities, and medical and lab supplies.

Keep reading for more information about Moglix’s funding and its rise to success. The tremendous effort from a board of very skilled professionals along with the goal to transform the B2B e-commerce space are only a couple of the steps along the way.

Collecting Investments

Rahul Garg knew from the get-go that the only way such a large business model could find success would be through dramatic fundraising and reliance on investors, so he searched far and wide for the first several years in which the company was in existence.

Before the company reached the size that it has today, it received a leg up from several very prominent investors. Its investor list includes firms such as Accel, Falcon Edge Capital, Tiger Global Management, Jungle Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and Ratan Tata. Garg’s vision was simple from the outset: he wanted to completely change the field his company operates in. 

“I wanted to transform the B2B e-commerce space because I felt that with the kind of changes that were happening in the B2C segment and with manufacturing infrastructure being the core part of the Indian economy, there was an opportunity in procurement, supply chain, and technology,” CEO Rahul Garg said in an interview with Forbes India.

“For manufacturing to become a trillion-dollar economy, we needed to reimagine and reconstruct this entire distribution. And that’s what we set out to do.”

As part of bringing B2C into B2B, Moglix’s products are all high-quality, labeled with the brand of origin, and priced appropriately with their own product listings. Instead of offering shipping in bulk of lower-quality products and only considering the price, Garg’s Moglix focuses on quality first and foremost.

Because of their consideration of the customer in their process of reconstructing business-to-business distribution, Moglix’s customer base has grown consistently. Spanning the UK, UAE, India, and Singapore, Moglix works with over half a million small- to medium-sized businesses and manufacturing plants to get them industrial goods. The company has grown tremendously, but Garg hopes to continue to scale.

Impact On the Indian Community

Located in South Asia, nearer to the source of the outbreak of the 2020 pandemic, India has experienced extreme effects as a result of COVID-19. Over forty million positive cases were confirmed in India all-time to go with over half a million deaths.

In America, when COVID cases got to their highest, medical help was overrun with the amount of cases and hospitalizations. India, which has a poorer population and less technologically proficient medical systems, was a country ravaged by the pandemic. Many COVID cases ended with unfortunate deaths in family homes rather than in hospital beds.

Medical supplies were in high demand for months on end, and Rahul Garg realized that he could help manufacture the oxygen concentrators that keep people on respirators alive.

His company had already manufactured and distributed personal protective equipment and masks for medical personnel when the pandemic first reached the company, and in COVID’s second and even more brutal wave in India, he pivoted once again.

Over the next few months, Garg was able to get his hands on over 6,000 oxygen concentrators. He was then able to supply them to those who needed them most in India and the surrounding areas. Garg attributed it to the necessity of the issue when he spoke to Forbes India.

“When you lose people so young, it is very tough. We knew we had to act. I was getting so many calls for oxygen concentrators and beds,” Garg said. “We work with the largest of manufacturing houses, and the first thing we did was to go after fixing the oxygen problem this time.”

Moglix prides itself on producing in India while still selling from India to different parts of the world, and Garg hopes this will begin to revitalize an industry that has grown stagnant. Armed with a massive selection of products created at its three thousand plus manufacturing plants, Moglix seems primed to do just what it has hoped to: break through.