Tolexo : Enables End To End Transactions For Office And Industry Goods

Tolexo an online bazaar for Industrial products, founded in 2013 by Brijesh Agarwal, Navneet Rai, Harsh Kundra.

The company is the ultimate destination for Business Goods & Supplies which transforms the way businesses buy these products. While IndiaMart was a directory site for buyers and sellers, Tolexo enables the end to end transactions for office and industry goods and thereby is also empowering the SMEs in India.

It is the only B2B e-commerce platform to launch a website, m-site and also an android and iOS app for its users.

Tolexo aims to take the buyer-seller collaboration to the next level where it can facilitate end to end transactions for office and industry goods

It's Vision is to empower SMEs to do business more efficiently by giving them better choices for anything they want to buy from other businesses

The company is recently planning to reach out to approximately 2,000 cities in the next two years time.

Chitrakshi Suneja Interacts With Brijesh Agarwal, Founder, Tolexo And Spoke to Him

Idea Generation

Between 2012-13, as we interacted with businesses, we saw a clear trend that they were getting more inclined to the idea of buying business goods online. The increasing penetration of consumer goods e-commerce and availability of multiple customer-friendly payment options had improved the trust of consumers in online buying and it was becoming clear that anyone who bought products online as a consumer was more and more inclined to the idea of buying goods online for their business too.

Thereafter, we got down to evaluating the model deeply and after a few months of meeting with potential customers & sellers, we decided to start building the platform in 2014.

About Founders

Today, we are a team of about 400 people.

Our co-founders together build the vision of making Tolexo the biggest organization in this space -

Brijesh Agarwal: Hailing from a trading business family background and a panoramic nineteen years of experience in the B2B e-commerce industry, Brijesh aims to leverage his expertise to make Tolexo a pioneer in the online industrial marketplace segment. He co-founded IndiaMART at the age of 20, and currently leads its B2B e-commerce business Tolexo as the Founder & CEO.

Navneet Rai: Navneet Rai is a serial entrepreneur with 12 years of experience in building and growing companies with multi-crore revenues by leveraging B2B and B2C opportunities. He has previously been a founding member of Inkfruit - an e-commerce company which has become exemplar of online retail success.

Harsh Kundra: He is a renowned veteran in the industry with a proven prowess in lean startup movements and agile product development. With over a decade’s experience in managing technology, Harsh has special expertise in e-commerce businesses. His last stint was as CTO at Jabong.com where he was responsible for building scalable and high performing web architecture.

Key Features

The key features of our product / services can be differentiated in broadly two spheres -

First, it is focused on businesses and not consumers; Second, our vision is to build this as an ecosystem rather than just an e-commerce platform.

On a micro level, Tolexo services manifests certain unique advantages -

- Widest assortment: Offering a wide range of categories (over 28) and over a million SKUs to select from and covering almost every aspect regarding industrial and business work.

- Tolexo Speedy: We provide a speedy dispatch of the orders and a doorstep delivery for the convenience of our clients.

- Standardized rates: Overcoming the issues relating to changing prices, we have fixed contractual rates for doing away with uncertain and sudden rate changes.

- Buy Now Pay Later: A first of its kind initiative launched for business buyers that makes bulk buying lot more convenient with interest free credit facility for buyers, up to 45 days.

Challenges Faced

Online buying by businesses is not a common phenomenon. One of the major challenges is to bring SME/business transactions online for business goods. Hence, one of the first barriers that players in this industry face is adoption. There is tremendous comfort & belief in traditional way of buying / sourcing and that leads to skepticism. How we stand out on this count is driven by the speed at which we have created seamless product experience on web as well as App platforms. Transparent pricing, product availability, authenticity of sellers, Genuineness of products and 100% easy payment modes (Cash on delivery, online buying etc.) are some of the core propositions that make the overall buying experience hassle free. Additionally, we have built a team of over 400 experienced customer support individuals which look after the post sales queries and grievances across multiple touch points support no’s and social platforms.

Investment and Traction Details

We are completely funded by IndiaMart. Recently, IndiaMART is learnt to have raised Rs 150 crore in its latest financing round led by UK-based tech venture fund Amadeus Capital along with Quona Capital and India-focused investment fund Westbridge Capital.

More than 2.5 lac businesses, from over 900 cities have transacted on Tolexo’s platform.

Differentiation Factors

B2B eCommerce in India has started to see a lot of action, but only off late. Hence, a lot of companies that compete with us are essentially start-ups like Industrybuying and Moglix. Looking at the future business prospects which is estimated to be $700bn by 2020, India is soon going to be a hot battle ground for other international big players.