Murugappa, TVS families invest in industrybuying.com

Family members of two big industrial conglomerates – the Murugappa Group and TVS - have pumped in an undisclosed amount in industrybuying.com, an e-commerce business-to-business (B2B) platform with a catalogue of more than 3,00,000 products.

The funding round saw participation from Vellayan Subbiah, managing director of Chola Finance, Muthu Murugappan, business head nutraceuticals, EID Parry, Arun Venkatachalam, angel investor and Arathi Krishna, joint managing director of Sundram Fasteners from TVS Group.

Swati Gupta, co-founder, industrybuying.com, on Monday told The Hindu that ''the investments are from the family members and not the company''.

Asked about how the deal worked between a Delhi firm and Chennai firms, she said, ''We knew Arun through our partners, SAIF Partners (a venture capital firm). Three months ago I had come to Chennai with my co-founder Rahul Gupta to finalise the deal.''

She explained, "The portal's focus is to build a scaled and profitable business which will help us propel to the next orbit of growth."

Industrybuying.com sells industrial products to small and medium enterprises as well as to large businesses. The funds raised will be used for further development of the online platform, establishing a nation-wide sales force, increasing its vendor base and developing a full suite of digital offerings for B2B brands.

Arathi Krishna said, ''B2B e-commerce is going to be the next big thing in India. It's a huge untapped market which is being addressed by industrybuying. They have managed to build a formidable team to take up this challenge as well. We are really excited to be a part of their continuing growth.''

Arun Venkatachalam has previously financed startups like ZoomCar, Firstouch Mobile and Autolotto & Posist.