OfBusiness raises a pre-IPO round and quietly becomes one of India's most profitable unicorns

OfBusiness occupies a genuinely unusual position in the Indian startup landscape: a company that is both large and profitable, having compounded operating profits across several consecutive years in a category - B2B raw-materials procurement and SME lending - that many investors initially dismissed as unglamorous relative to the consumer-internet plays that dominated the 2018-2022 funding cycle. The pre-IPO round, which values the company comfortably above its previous priced level and brings in a mix of institutional and sovereign investors, sets up what is widely expected to be a domestic listing within the next four quarters. The OfBusiness model is genuinely distinctive. The platform, founded by Asish Mohapatra and Ruchi Kalra alongside co-founders from IIMA and McKinsey, combines raw-material procurement for manufacturing SMEs - steel, chemicals, electrical components - with working-capital financing that helps those SMEs manage the cash-flow mismatch between raw-material purchases and finished-goods sales. The two businesses are deeply synergistic: the procurement data provides underwriting intelligence for the lending decisions, while the lending relationship creates stickiness that makes it harder for SMEs to switch to alternative procurement platforms. The profitability story is what makes OfBusiness genuinely different from most of its late-stage peer group. Unlike consumer-internet companies that have treated losses as an investment in growth, OfBusiness has managed its expansion to remain within profitability guardrails - growing the lending book at a pace that the company's risk infrastructure can monitor, and adding procurement categories only where the margin contribution is positive. This capital efficiency has meant the company has never needed to raise capital at any price to survive; each round has been done from a position of operational strength rather than necessity. The IPO, when it comes, will ask public-market investors to evaluate a business that sits at the intersection of B2B e-commerce, trade finance and NBFC - three categories with very different valuation frameworks. The company's advisers will need to construct a compelling comparable set and a narrative that helps institutional investors understand the business model's resilience across credit cycles. The lending book's performance through the 2022-2024 rate-hike environment, during which many NBFC books saw elevated stress, will be a central feature of the IPO story. What to watch: the revenue mix between procurement and lending at the time of the DRHP filing, whether the lending book's NPA levels remain below the industry averages that management has cited in recent conversations, and how the IPO values the company relative to listed NBFCs and B2B e-commerce platforms globally.

Original source: Mint Street