Bijnis, a business-to-business marketplace for unorganised retail segment on Tuesday raised $10 mn in Series A, co-led by Matrix Partners India and Sequoia Capital India, along with existing investors InfoEdge and Waterbridge Ventures.
Bijnis will use the capital to help manufacturers grow their business by expanding their distribution network of retailers across India. Additionally, the funds will be used for building out more products and scalable technology focused on manufacturers in the footwear and fashion categories.
Founded five years back by Siddharth Vij, Chaitanya Rathi, Siddharth Rastogi, and Shubham Agarwal, Bijnis (formerly known as ShoeKonnect), focuses on facilitating a digital transaction layer between manufacturers and retailers in the unorganized categories of footwear, fashion, and accessories. The start-up currently enables 400 plus manufacturers to serve 60,000 plus retailers across 700 (out of 729) districts in India.
“Traditional B2B supply chains are still largely unorganized and fragmented. There lies an immense opportunity in building a digital ecosystem around the same. Building the model for one category over the last three years has helped us understand the problems that lie at the core of unorganized supply chains. We believe we are on the right track and positioned to expand and revolutionize the traditional B2B ecosystem around the fashion and lifestyle categories, ” said Siddharth Vij, chief executive officer and co-founder of Bijnis.
Traditional supply chains across fashion and footwear category are highly unorganized and fragmented in India. The industry is at the brink of massive transformation thanks to rapid digitization across various layers in these supply chains. “Bijnis is leveraging these trends to build the next-gen product for small manufacturers who are the backbone of these supply chains in India. We are excited to partner with the Bijnis team in their mission to digitize small manufacturers and empower them by bringing information symmetry, efficiency and expanding their reach,” said Shraeyansh Thakur, vice-president at Sequoia Capital India LLP.
