Startup Deep Dive : OfBusiness — the unicorn that got more profitable by selling less

OfBusiness sells steel, cement and chemicals to small factories — a business with margins so thin that its FY26 EBITDA margin was 4%. And yet it closed that year with a consolidated profit of ₹724 crore ($75 million, at $1 ≈ ₹96.0), making it one of the rare Indian unicorns that has been profitable for years, not months.

The contradiction runs deeper. In FY26, OfBusiness’s revenue actually fell 7% to ₹20,645 crore, as per its own filings reported by Entrackr in July 2026 — the company walked away from low-return business on purpose. A start-up that once chased scale at any cost is now choosing to earn less, on purpose, and calling it progress. That decision, and the near-decade of rejection and reinvention behind it, is the story here.

Quick facts

What they do

OfBusiness runs a business-to-business commerce platform that buys industrial raw materials — long steel, flat steel, cement, bulk chemicals, polymers and agri inputs, among more than 50 categories — in bulk from large manufacturers and resells them in smaller, workable lots to small and medium manufacturers who could never negotiate that scale on their own. Layered on top is Oxyzo, an RBI-registered NBFC that lends working capital to those same SMEs so they can actually pay for the materials they are ordering. The pitch to a small foundry or construction contractor is simple: buy your steel here, and if you are short on cash this month, borrow against the same order from the lender sitting inside the same platform.

The origin

Asish Mohapatra spent five years as an investor at Matrix Partners India after stints at ITC and McKinsey; Ruchi Kalra was a partner at McKinsey. The two, married to each other, left Mumbai for Delhi in 2015 to build OfBusiness with three other co-founders — Vasant Sridhar, Bhuvan Gupta and Nitin Jain — while expecting their first child, as reported by BusinessToday in its profile of Mohapatra. The founders spent roughly a year studying how India’s SMEs actually bought raw materials before incorporating the company in August 2015. Their first insight was about procurement: small manufacturers paid more for steel and cement than large companies simply because they ordered less. Within months, a second insight overtook the first. As Mohapatra has recounted, it became clear that procurement could not be fixed without also fixing financing — an SME that could source cheaper steel still could not pay for it if its working capital was stuck in unpaid invoices. That realisation, not the original one, is what OfBusiness was actually built around, and it led directly to the founding of Oxyzo in 2016.

The struggle years

The idea of bolting a lending business onto a trading business was, by Mohapatra’s own account, close to unsellable to investors in 2016. He has said his funding pitch was turned down 73 times over roughly six months that year, as reported by YourStory and BusinessToday. Venture investors understood commerce businesses and they understood lending businesses; a start-up trying to be both, run by five founders none of whom had a credit background, did not fit either template. Mohapatra’s response was to become the company’s own underwriter — he has said he taught himself credit analysis by studying more than a thousand company balance sheets before OfBusiness made its first loan.

The second setback came much later and looked nothing like the first. By mid-2021, OfBusiness was profitable, growing fast and being talked up for an IPO within 18 to 24 months, a target the company itself floated around its unicorn round that July. That timeline did not hold. Broader Indian start-up valuations reset sharply through 2022 and 2023 as global capital pulled back from growth-stage technology bets, and OfBusiness’s own listing plans went quiet for years rather than the 18 to 24 months first floated. When the company did revive its IPO process, reported by Inc42 in August 2026, the valuation it was said to be targeting for that listing — $5–6 billion — sat below the $6–9 billion range bankers had earlier been said to be pitching, a marker of how much the intervening years had cost in ambition even as the underlying business kept growing. The company’s FY26 numbers carry a smaller, quieter version of the same lesson: revenue fell 7% year-on-year to ₹20,645 crore as OfBusiness, by its own account cited by Entrackr, deliberately exited business lines that were not returning enough to justify the capital they used. Growth had stopped being the point.

The turning point

The clearest inflection is financial, and it happened within a single year. In July 2021, OfBusiness closed a $160 million round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 that valued the company at $1.5 billion — its first unicorn round, and vindication, five years on, of the model that had been rejected 73 times, as reported by Forbes India. Five months later, in December 2021, it raised $325 million more, led by Alpha Wave Global, Tiger Global and SoftBank Vision Fund 2, at a valuation of $5 billion, reported by TechCrunch and separately referenced in later industry coverage of the round. A company had gone from unable to raise its first institutional cheque to more than tripling its valuation in under half a year — proof, to the market at least, that commerce and credit sold together were worth more than either sold alone.

The money behind it

OfBusiness built its capital base in stages rather than one dramatic raise. Matrix Partners India came in as an early backer, followed by Norwest Venture Partners, which led a ₹250 crore round in 2019 alongside Falcon Edge Capital and Matrix, as reported by YourStory. Falcon Edge then led a $110 million round in April 2021 that valued the company near $800 million, per Inc42’s reporting at the time. That was followed within months by the $160 million SoftBank-led unicorn round (July 2021, $1.5 billion valuation) and the $325 million Alpha Wave-Tiger Global-SoftBank round (December 2021, $5 billion valuation) — together, more than $650 million raised in well under a year, on the figures disclosed across those three rounds alone. Oxyzo, the lending arm, later raised its own dedicated round: $200 million in March 2022, co-led by Alpha Wave and Tiger Global with Norwest, Matrix and Creation Investments participating, valuing it at $1 billion in its own right, as reported by Retail Banker International. Each backer changed something concrete: Matrix supplied the founding conviction when no one else would, Norwest and Falcon Edge funded the years of scaling the commerce side, and SoftBank’s entry in 2021 is what pulled in the larger global growth funds behind it.

How it makes money

The commerce business works on thin, back-to-back margins: OfBusiness buys steel, cement or chemicals against a confirmed customer order, marks it up modestly, and moves it on, which is why the company has said commodity price swings are largely hedged out by not holding unsold inventory. Money in is the sale price of the material; money out is what it paid the manufacturer plus logistics; the margin is the spread, and it is small by design. On this side of the business, working capital cycles have run in the 30 to 33 day range, which is why volume, not margin, has historically driven the commerce numbers.

Oxyzo works on a completely different logic: it lends against the same purchase orders and receivables the commerce business already has visibility into, earning interest income rather than a trading margin — interest income accounted for roughly 95% of Oxyzo’s own revenue in FY25, according to reporting by The Head and Tale in May 2025. The part people tend to get wrong is treating OfBusiness as primarily a trading company with a lending side-hustle; in profit terms, as the next section shows, the reverse is closer to true. The commerce business supplies the volume and the customer relationships; the lending business, built on data from those same relationships, is where a disproportionate share of the profit actually sits.

The numbers

Consolidated revenue and profit after tax over the last four reported financial years, compiled from Entrackr’s reporting on OfBusiness’s own filings:

Two things stand out. Revenue growth decelerated sharply — from roughly 26% in FY24 to essentially flat, then a 7% decline in FY26 — while profit kept climbing in every year except a small dip in FY25. EBITDA margin, correspondingly, moved from 6.3% in FY23 to 7.44% in FY24, then dipped to 2.6% in FY25 before recovering to 4% in FY26, as reported by Entrackr. A business this size running on single-digit EBITDA margins is normal for a trading operation; what is less normal is that it has managed to stay net profitable through all four years while doing it.

Where the money comes from

The split between the two businesses is lopsided in a way that is easy to miss. In FY26, the commerce business alone generated ₹19,174 crore of the group’s ₹20,645 crore in revenue — Oxyzo’s lending operations made up the remaining roughly 7%, per Entrackr’s July 2026 reporting. Yet in FY25, Oxyzo’s standalone profit of ₹339 crore accounted for well over half of OfBusiness’s consolidated ₹597 crore profit that year, on the figures reported by The Head and Tale and Entrackr respectively. A business that supplies less than a tenth of group revenue is generating more than half of group profit — the surprise buried in an otherwise unglamorous set of trading numbers. Oxyzo’s own asset base had grown to ₹11,800 crore by FY26, up 28% year-on-year, with a gross non-performing asset ratio of 0.75% and a return on assets of 3.8%, according to Entrackr’s reporting on the group’s FY26 results. The commerce side supplies the scale and the customer data; the lending side, quietly, supplies the profit.

The risks

Three risks sit close to the surface of this model. First, commodity cyclicality: OfBusiness deals in steel, non-ferrous metals, chemicals and cement, all of which move with global commodity cycles, and while the company says its back-to-back order structure limits inventory price risk, a sharp demand slowdown among SME buyers would hit order volumes directly, and volume is what the low-margin commerce business depends on. Second, credit risk inside Oxyzo: an NBFC lending to small and medium enterprises is inherently exposed to concentrated, less-diversified borrowers, and while its FY26 gross NPA ratio of 0.75% is currently low, that number was built during a period when Oxyzo’s asset base was still growing quickly; a slower economy tends to show up first in SME repayment behaviour. Third, margin dependency at scale: with an EBITDA margin of just 4% even in a good year, OfBusiness needs enormous transaction volumes to generate meaningful absolute profit, which is exactly why FY26’s conscious retreat from low-return business lines cut revenue by 7% even as it helped profit — the model has little room to absorb bad growth, and the company’s own actions in FY26 show it now knows that.

The takeaway

The lesson in OfBusiness’s numbers is not that combining commerce and credit is clever, though it clearly is. It is that a business built on wafer-thin trading margins can still be one of the more disciplined companies in India’s start-up ecosystem, precisely because thin margins leave no room for the usual growth-at-all-costs habits. When OfBusiness let revenue fall 7% in FY26 rather than keep chasing volume that did not pay, it was doing something most well-funded, richly valued companies find very hard to do: choosing a smaller number over a bigger one, because the smaller number was the honest one.

Frequently asked questions

What does OfBusiness actually sell?

It sells industrial raw materials — steel, cement, chemicals, polymers and agri inputs among more than 50 categories — sourced in bulk and resold in smaller quantities to small and medium manufacturers, alongside working-capital loans through its NBFC subsidiary Oxyzo.

Is OfBusiness profitable?

Yes. It reported consolidated profit after tax of ₹724 crore on revenue of ₹20,645 crore in FY26, continuing a run of net profitability that stretches back at least to FY23, as per its filings reported by Entrackr.

What is OfBusiness’s current valuation?

Its last confirmed private valuation was $5 billion, set in a December 2021 funding round reported by TechCrunch. As of its 2026 IPO process, reported by Inc42, it was said to be targeting a listing valuation of $5–6 billion.

Is OfBusiness going public?

It converted to a public limited company (OFB Tech Limited) in December 2024 and, according to Inc42’s August 2026 reporting, was targeting a DRHP filing by mid-November 2026 for an IPO of up to $800 million, after having earlier deferred listing plans amid weaker market conditions.

How is Oxyzo different from OfBusiness’s core business?

Oxyzo is a separately regulated NBFC that lends to the same SME customers OfBusiness sells materials to, earning interest income rather than a trading margin; in FY25 it contributed more than half of the group’s consolidated profit while generating only a small fraction of group revenue.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• TechCrunch, December 2021 — “India’s OfBusiness valued at $5 billion in $325 million funding”
• Entrackr, July 2024 — “Exclusive: OfBusiness revenue nears Rs 20,000 Cr in FY24; profits crosses Rs 600 Cr”
• OfBusiness press release via ofbusiness.com, 2024 — “OfBusiness FY24 operating revenue up 26% on year to Rs 19,296 crore”
• The Head and Tale, May 2025 — “OfBusiness’ lending unit Oxyzo posts increase in FY25 revenue, profit”
• Entrackr, 29 July 2026 — “Exclusive: OfBusiness reports consolidated profit of Rs 724 Cr on Rs 20,645 Cr revenue in FY26”
• Inc42, 5 August 2026 — “OfBusiness Set To File DRHP For $800 Mn IPO By Mid-November”
• The Arc, 2026 — “SoftBank-backed OfBusiness to target $6-9 bn IPO valuation next year”
• Forbes India, 3 August 2021 — “From incredulous to incredible: How OfBusiness turned into a profitable unicorn”
• YourStory, April 2021 — “[Funding alert] OfBusiness raises $110M led by Falcon Edge Capital”
• YourStory, September 2019 — “[Funding alert] SME lending platform OfBusiness raises Rs 250 Cr led by Norwest Venture Partners”
• BusinessToday, 21 March 2024 — “The Master Builder: Entrepreneur Asish Mohapatra and the birth of two unicorns”
• Retail Banker International, 24 March 2022 — “Indian lending startup Oxyzo turns unicorn with $200m funding”

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