In September 2021, WestBridge Capital led a $30 million round into Bijnis, with Info Edge, Peak XV Partners and Matrix Partners India writing cheques alongside it, betting that India’s unorganised footwear and apparel trade could be moved onto a single digital platform. Eighteen months later, Info Edge marked its entire stake in Bijnis’s parent company down to zero, citing “continuing cash burn” and no clear path to fresh capital (Info Edge regulatory filing, Q4 FY23, reported by Inc42, May 2023).
That reversal sits at the centre of the Bijnis story: a founder who grew up inside a footwear factory, a platform that genuinely digitised thousands of small manufacturers, and a business model whose commission income never caught up with what it cost to run. This piece traces what Bijnis sells, why one of its earliest and largest backers walked away, and what its own filings say about the gap between revenue and loss.
Quick facts
| Company | Bijnis (legal entity: Bizcrum Infotech Private Limited) |
| Founded | 2015, New Delhi — launched as ShoeKonnect, renamed Bijnis in 2019 |
| Founder(s) | Siddharth Vij (CEO), Siddharth Rastogi, Chaitanya Rathi and Shubham Agarwal |
| Businesses | B2B commerce platform connecting footwear, apparel and accessories manufacturers with retailers across India |
| Latest FY revenue | ₹52 crore from operations, FY23 (year ended March 2023) |
| Latest FY profit/loss | Net loss of ₹100 crore, FY23 |
| Listed | Private (unlisted) |
| Market value / last valuation | Reported at approximately ₹1,390 crore (~$145 million at $1 ≈ ₹96.0, 18 September 2026, Trading Economics) around its September 2021 Series B |
| Key shareholders / CEO | CEO Siddharth Vij; backers include WestBridge Capital, Peak XV Partners (formerly Sequoia Capital India), Matrix Partners India and WaterBridge Ventures; Info Edge wrote off its stake in May 2023 |
What they do
Bijnis runs a business-to-business marketplace app that lets small footwear, apparel and accessories manufacturers sell directly to retailers, cutting out the layer of local agents and distributors who traditionally sat between a factory and a shop counter. A retailer in a small town can browse factory catalogues, place a low-minimum order, and have it delivered, while a manufacturer gets a demand channel and, in some cases, working-capital support without depending on a handful of regional wholesalers. The company describes itself as building an “operating system for factories” rather than just a sales channel, bundling discovery, ordering, logistics and finance for a market that has historically run on paper ledgers and personal relationships (company website, bijnis.com/about-us, accessed September 2026).
The origin
Siddharth Vij grew up in Agra watching his father run a shoe manufacturing unit, and later, while studying in Delhi, began looking for ways to fix the inefficiencies he had seen firsthand in that business (Founder Thesis interview, May 2023). Agra is one of India’s largest footwear manufacturing clusters, dominated by small and mid-sized units that sell through layers of commission agents, each taking a cut and adding delay between a factory floor and a shop shelf. Vij’s insight was narrow and specific rather than a grand market thesis: digitise the order-taking and fulfilment relationship between a manufacturer he understood personally and the retailers who bought from people like his father. He built the first version of that idea with Siddharth Rastogi, Chaitanya Rathi and Shubham Agarwal, launching in 2015 under the name ShoeKonnect, tightly scoped to the footwear trade before the company broadened into apparel and rebranded as Bijnis in 2019 (Bijnis company blog, “A journey from ShoeKonnect to Bijnis.com”; Tracxn company profile).
The struggle years
The years between the ShoeKonnect launch and the Series B were not a straight climb. Two setbacks stand out in the public record.
- The rebrand and category widening (2019): a single-category footwear marketplace was too narrow to justify venture-scale ambitions, so the company renamed itself Bijnis and pushed into apparel and accessories — a strategic reset that came with the execution risk of rebuilding brand recognition from zero (Bijnis company blog; Tracxn).
- Losses outrunning revenue every single year: Info Edge’s own regulatory disclosure noted that from FY18 through FY21, Bijnis’s revenue climbed from ₹37 lakh to ₹15.91 crore while losses climbed alongside it from ₹78.5 lakh to ₹18.34 crore — and “there was no single fiscal year of operations when the revenue was more than the loss” (Info Edge filing, cited by Forbes India, June 2023). That is not a company easing into profitability; it is one where scale and loss grew in lockstep for its first six years.
- FY22 losses nearly tripled: net loss jumped from ₹18.34 crore in FY21 to ₹54.6 crore in FY22, even as revenue from operations grew a healthier 57.9% to ₹25.12 crore, because employee costs alone jumped 3.5 times to ₹44.52 crore (Entrackr, 31 March 2023, citing MCA filings).
The turning point
The defining moment did not come from a competitor or a market shift. It came from inside the cap table. In September 2021, Bijnis closed a $30 million Series B led by WestBridge Capital, with Info Edge, Peak XV Partners (then Sequoia Capital India), Matrix Partners India and WaterBridge Ventures all participating — a vote of confidence from five institutional names in one round (Entrackr, September 2021; YourStory, September 2021). Eighteen months later, in its Q4 FY23 results, Info Edge — by then Bijnis’s largest external shareholder at roughly 26.3% — wrote off its entire ₹76.6 crore investment in Bizcrum Infotech, the company behind Bijnis (Inc42, 26 May 2023; Indian Startup News, May 2023). Info Edge’s own filing named the reasons in unusually blunt language for a listed company: “continuing cash burn,” cash that was thin relative to buyback obligations owed to investors under the shareholders’ agreement, and “uncertainty of future capital raise.” It called the write-off technical, tied to contingent liquidation-preference obligations rather than a claim that the equity was worth literally nothing — but the signal was unmistakable. A backer that had put money in during the same round as WestBridge was, a year and a half later, telling its own public shareholders it expected to get nothing back.
The money behind it
- Seed and early rounds (2015–2019): undisclosed early backing as the company operated under the ShoeKonnect name (Tracxn company profile).
- Series A — $10 million, July 2020: led by Sequoia Capital India (now Peak XV Partners) and Matrix Partners India, with participation from existing investor WaterBridge Ventures (Entrackr; Inc42, May 2023).
- Series B — $30 million, September 2021: led by WestBridge Capital, joined by Info Edge, Matrix Partners India, Sequoia Capital India and WaterBridge Ventures (Entrackr, September 2021; YourStory, September 2021).
- Total raised: reported at $43.5 million across six rounds from roughly 40 investors (Tracxn; Clay funding database) — broadly consistent with Forbes India’s independent tally of “over ₹320 crore since inception” as of May 2023.
- What each backer changed: Sequoia/Matrix’s Series A validated the model to later-stage investors; WestBridge’s lead in the Series B brought the round’s largest cheque and pushed the valuation past the ₹1,000 crore mark; Info Edge’s participation — and later, very public exit in substance if not in shareholding — became the reference point every subsequent investor conversation about Bijnis had to address.
- Latest reported valuation: approximately ₹1,390 crore around the September 2021 Series B (Tracxn; Clay) — no priced round has been publicly reported since, and Info Edge’s write-off suggests at least one large shareholder marked its own stake to zero within two years of that valuation.
How it makes money
Bijnis earns primarily by taking a commission on the goods manufacturers sell through its platform to retailers, supplemented by smaller freight and finance-related income. The FY23 numbers make the mix explicit:
- Commission revenue: ₹47 crore in FY23, up 2.1 times year-on-year, and roughly 90% of total operating revenue (Entrackr, April 2024, citing MCA filings).
- Other operating income: the remaining approximately 10% of operating revenue came from freight and related services (Entrackr, April 2024).
- Non-operating income: ₹13 crore from interest and gains on investments in FY23, taking total income to ₹65 crore against ₹52 crore of operating revenue (Entrackr, April 2024).
- Where the margin does not sit: employee benefit costs alone were ₹82 crore in FY23 — more than the entire operating revenue — up 82.2% from ₹45 crore in FY22 (Entrackr, April 2024).
- The part people get wrong: a commission-on-GMV model on low-ticket, low-margin goods like budget footwear looks like an e-commerce business but behaves more like a logistics-and-financing business — the company has to fund working capital, freight and a large field/operations team to keep small manufacturers and retailers transacting, and that cost base scaled faster than commission income in every fiscal year on record. Bijnis has not published an explicit take-rate percentage; the commission share of revenue above is the closest public proxy.
The numbers
All figures below are from Bizcrum Infotech Private Limited’s Ministry of Corporate Affairs filings as reported by Entrackr, unit ₹ crore, financial year ending 31 March.
| Metric | FY21 | FY22 | FY23 |
| Revenue from operations | 15.91 | 25.12 | 52 |
| Total income (incl. other income) | n/a | n/a | 65 |
| Total expenses | 35.71 | 88.9 | 164 |
| Net loss | 18.34 | 54.6 | 100 |
- Revenue growth: operating revenue grew 57.9% in FY22 over FY21, then 100% in FY23 over FY22 (Entrackr, March 2023 and April 2024).
- Loss growth outpaced revenue growth in FY22: losses nearly tripled (2.9x) versus revenue growth of 1.6x that year (Entrackr, March 2023).
- Cost-to-revenue ratio: Bijnis spent ₹3.54 to earn ₹1 of operating income in FY22, improving only slightly to ₹3.15 in FY23 (Entrackr, March 2023 and April 2024) — still spending more than three rupees for every rupee earned.
- FY24 onward: no FY24 or FY25 revenue and loss figures have been published by financial-media trackers as of this writing; corporate registry aggregators show only a broad operating-revenue band (₹1–100 crore) for FY24, which is too wide to report as a figure, so it is left out here rather than estimated.
Where the money comes from
- Category split: footwear was the founding category and remains core; apparel — jeans, t-shirts, formal shirts, trousers, sarees, kurtis and other ethnic and western wear — was added after the 2019 rebrand (company website, accessed September 2026).
- Manufacturing hubs: supply is sourced from clusters in Delhi, Agra, Surat, Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Ludhiana and Mumbai — each a traditional Indian manufacturing centre for footwear or apparel (company website, accessed September 2026).
- Reach, company-stated: Bijnis says it delivers to more than 12,000 pin codes, serves over 200,000 retailers and works with more than 2,000 manufacturing partners (company website, accessed September 2026) — up sharply from the roughly 1,500 manufacturers and 80,000 retailers across 710 districts the company reported around its Series B in 2021 (YourStory, March 2021), though the two figures are not from the same audited source and should be read as company-stated scale rather than filed metrics.
- The surprise: the categories that generate the most retailer traffic — cheap, fast-moving footwear and apparel — are also the lowest-margin, which is precisely why commission revenue (90% of operating revenue) has never been enough on its own to cover the cost of running the field operations and logistics needed to serve those same categories.
The risks
- Structural cash burn against a commission model: Info Edge’s own write-off filing flagged “continuing cash burn” and cash reserves that were thin against contingent buyback obligations owed to investors — a mechanism where a company can run out of runway even before an accounting loss shows up, because it owes cash-like liabilities to its own backers (Info Edge filing, cited by Inc42 and Forbes India, May–June 2023).
- Well-funded, larger competitors in the same lane: Bijnis competes with Udaan and Reliance-owned Ajio Business in broad B2B commerce, and with IndiaMART in trade discovery — all considerably larger and, in Udaan’s and Ajio’s case, backed by significantly deeper pools of capital, which pressures Bijnis’s ability to win volume without matching their subsidies (Founder Thesis, May 2023; Owler competitor listing).
- Dependence on unorganised, thin-margin supply and demand: the company’s entire addressable base — small footwear and apparel factories and small retailers — is precisely the segment least able to absorb price shocks, raw-material inflation or a slowdown in discretionary spending, meaning Bijnis’s commission pool is only as resilient as the weakest part of India’s informal retail economy.
The takeaway
The lesson in Bijnis is not that digitising an unorganised trade is a bad idea — the company genuinely built a working app-based supply chain between real factories and real shopkeepers, and its revenue did compound, doubling in FY23 alone. The lesson is that a commission-only model layered on top of low-ticket, low-margin goods has to earn enough per transaction to cover the very real cost of building trust, extending working capital and running logistics in a market that had never digitised before — and if it does not, growth in revenue and growth in loss will keep moving together, as they did for Bijnis in every fiscal year from FY18 to FY23. When one of your own investors writes that down in a public filing, it stops being an internal debate about unit economics and becomes a public verdict on the model.
Frequently asked questions
What does Bijnis do?
Bijnis runs a business-to-business platform connecting footwear, apparel and accessories manufacturers directly with retailers across India, letting retailers order factory-direct inventory in small minimum quantities without going through traditional agents or distributors.
Who founded Bijnis, and when?
Bijnis was founded in 2015 by Siddharth Vij, Siddharth Rastogi, Chaitanya Rathi and Shubham Agarwal, initially launched under the name ShoeKonnect before rebranding to Bijnis in 2019.
How much funding has Bijnis raised, and what is it worth?
Bijnis has raised a reported $43.5 million across six rounds, including a $10 million Series A in July 2020 and a $30 million Series B in September 2021 led by WestBridge Capital. Its last reported valuation, around that Series B, was approximately ₹1,390 crore (Tracxn; Clay).
Why did Info Edge write off its investment in Bijnis?
In its Q4 FY23 results, Info Edge wrote off its entire ₹76.6 crore investment in Bizcrum Infotech, Bijnis’s parent, citing continuing cash burn, cash reserves thin against buyback obligations owed to investors, and uncertainty over Bijnis raising further capital (Inc42; Indian Startup News, May 2023).
Is Bijnis profitable?
No. Filings reported by Entrackr show losses in every fiscal year on record, including a ₹100 crore net loss in FY23 on ₹52 crore of operating revenue, with no fiscal year since at least FY18 in which revenue exceeded losses (Entrackr; Forbes India, citing Info Edge’s own filing).
Sources
Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).
- Entrackr, “Bijnis records 100% growth in FY23; losses touch Rs 100 Cr”, April 2024
- Entrackr, “Bijnis spent Rs 89 Cr to make Rs 25 Cr from ops in FY22”, March 2023
- Inc42, “Info Edge Writes Off Entire Investment In Sequoia-Backed Bijnis”, May 2023
- Indian Startup News, “Info Edge writes off Rs 76.6 crore investment in Bijnis; know the reason”, May 2023
- Forbes India, “Why Info Edge lost faith in bijnis”, June 2023
- Entrackr, “Bijnis raises $30 Mn in Series B round led by Westbridge Capital”, September 2021
- YourStory, “B2B startup bijnis raises $30M in Series B funding”, September 2021
- YourStory, funding coverage of Bijnis Series A/growth round, March 2021
- Founder Thesis, “Building the e-commerce platform for factories”, May 2023
- Bijnis company blog (Medium), “A journey from ShoeKonnect to Bijnis.com”
- Bijnis company website, About Us page, accessed September 2026
- Tracxn, Bijnis company profile, accessed September 2026
- Clay, Bijnis funding dossier, accessed September 2026
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