Bizongo: Business On The Go for Plastics & Chemical Industries & SMEs

In this series, we are covering the articles that are working for the betterment of SMEs in India. The first we discussed was Power2SME and you can read the article here. Just to remind you, we are covering the startups and companies which are actively helping SMEs on a large scale.

This time we are covering Bizongo, an online B2B marketplace. Bizongo is a platform for the manufacturers & suppliers of Plastics, packaging materials, chemicals, paints and multiple other products to get connected to and sell their products to the buyers online.

Bizongo is an startup from the alumni of IIT Mumbai & IIT Delhi. It was started in April, 2015 after the founders did a large amount of research to understand the pain points in the business between the SMEs and also between the manufacturers & consumers. New buyers are not able to connect to the correct suppliers to get the right products. There are no formal ways of connecting to them. They use various mediums, from whatsapp to emails.

As they put it, Bizongo aims to become a one-stop solution for all business interaction and transaction. With the advent of technology in India, there is a burning need for a marketplace which can provide the complete experience of selecting the right product, seamless communication between buyer/seller and secure transactions. Bizongo plans to bridge this gap. Although they have started with plastics & packaging items, paints & chemicals related products, they have plans to expand soon to other segments also.

So what’s the business model of Bizongo? They help large manufacturers to sell directly to small and medium sized businesses. Small and medium sized suppliers are benefited by increasing their sales across geographies. They charge them a nominal referral fee on successful sales while providing them a fully integrated logistics and payment service. Giving sellers a streamlined, technological platform to increase their visibility by creating a highly detailed product portfolio for the sellers outlining proper specifications and applications. Bizongo helps them to reach out to a large number of buyers giving them access to a market which they were not able to address earlier. On the buyer side, it is helping SME’s reach relevant suppliers directly and source products at the best prices with complete trust and convenience. Also using data analytics, they help them plan their purchase to further reduce their overall procurement cost to a great extent.

Talking about the revenues, Vartika Gupta from Bizongo told us that although Bizongo has not completed one year in operation, the monthly revenue is INR 2.6 Crores per month as on March 2016. So it seems that they have aquired quite a bit of market in Maharashtra and Gujarat. They are headquartered at Hiranadani, Mumbai and the team comprises of 13 people. They have also raised an undisclosed amount of fund from Accel Partners in Oct, 15.

When asked about the future plans of Bizongo, Vartika told us “We are concentrating our efforts on creating a complete ecosystem for packaging and material handling. We would be focusing on increasing the product portfolio along with providing solutions for customized requirements across packaging industries. Our focal point is to create a fully automated platform and reduce inefficiencies in the current processes. We will be aiming towards bringing suppliers from across India, irrespective of their size of the industry. Also, we will be paying attention towards expanding the buyer profiles and the kind of industries we are serving. We will also be focusing on establishing tie-ups and integrating with logistics service providers on different routes based on their operational excellence.” So the aims of Bizongo are quite clear. They took a very niche market in the Maharashtra area, proved their business model, built a brand and now they are expanding both, their domain and the areas of operation.

The aims of Bizongo are bit similar to the aims of CoreLogs. But both have taken very different approaches to their goals. Bizongo is right now a full fledged B2B E-Commerce platform for SMEs in the Plastics & chemical industries with some amount of revenue. On the other hand CoreLogs presents itself as a B2B Networking & product listing platform for SMEs across the segments & Industrial areas/cities. Anyway, the business that Bizongo has created seems sustainable unlike many other startups in this segment. We at CoreLogs feel that the way Bizongo is operating, they can be truly helpful to SMEs, small suppliers, those in need of small quantity of bulk products in the plastic packaging & chemical industries. Apart from that, for large manufacturers, it is going to be a way to connect with SMEs and small suppliers which is truly a good thing for both of them.

We hope that Bizongo helps the SMEs as it has planned to do and create true value by providing a much needed onlineplatform to SMEs. SMEs can connect to Bizongo by registering their SME on Bizongo.