With Oxyzo Financial Services completing its first external funding of $200 million, its co-founders Ruchi Kalra and Asish Mohapatra, who also runs a unicorn start-up OfBusiness, have become the country’s first husband-wife couple to own companies separately having over $1 billion valuation each. Oxyzo Financial Services, the lending arm of SoftBank-backed business-to-business commerce start-up OfBusiness, has raised 200 million in what is the largest Series-A funding ever for an Indian start-up, according to information available on OfBusiness’ website.
The fund was raised in the Series-A round, led by Alpha Wave and co-led by Tiger Global, Norwest Venture Partners, Matrix Partners and Creation Investments. With a valuation of $1 billion after the funding, Oxyzo is the latest addition to India’s growing list of unicorns. The new financing was co-led by Alpha Wave Global and Tiger Global with participation from Norwest Venture Partners, Matrix Partners and Creation Investments, Oxyzo Chief Executive Ruchi Kalra was quoted on the OfBusiness website as saying to ET.
“We have operated Oxyzo as a separate unit as part of the OfBusiness group with its own team and now, the business has reached a point where it could raise capital on its own. For example, 70 per cent of lending from Oxyzo is outside the OfBusiness suppliers,” she added, according to the OfBusiness website.
OfBusiness, formally known as OFB Tech Pvt, surpassed the USD 1-billion valuation in April last year when SoftBank and others invested, said Mohapatra, as per a Bloomberg report. The company supplies bulk raw materials such as steel, diesel, food grains and industrial chemicals to small and medium-sized businesses. In December, the start-up’s valuation reached nearly USD 5 billion as SoftBank and others put more money into it, according to the report.
Oxyzo lends to SMEs for supply-chain finance and has also started lending to new-age businesses in sectors like logistics, warehousing and direct-to-consumer, besides financing suppliers of OfBusiness.
Kalra, 38, and Mohapatra, 41, are alumni of the Indian Institute of Technology. They both met while working at McKinsey & Co. Kalra is the chief executive officer of Oxyzo while her husband Mohapatra is the CEO at OfBusiness.
Founded in 2016, Oxyzo has more than 500 employees and a data warehouse specializing in supply chain analytics. It has disbursed over $2 billion in loans and has been profitable since its inception. Kalra said Oxyzo currently has USD 350 million of assets under management, which has doubled in one year, with gross non-performing assets of 1.2 per cent. “Oxyzo has been profitable since its inception and is currently at around 5.5 per cent pre-tax return on assets, or RoA,” she said, as per the OfBusiness website.
The latest $200 million funds will be used to expand Oxyzo’s broader digital financial services play organically and inorganically across a strong own balance sheet play, scaling the supply chain marketplace, launching innovative fixed income products for the SME space, and scaling other fee incomes business lines including debt capital markets and securities, according to an official statement.
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