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Startup Deep Dive : Bizom — the startup that refused to die twice and still runs at a loss

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The Invincible India Startup Deep Dive featured graphic for Bizom.

In February 2010, Lalit Bhise told his staff there was less than two months of salary left in the bank. Four of his five co-founders walked out that week, leaving two people in the office. Fifteen years later, the company Bhise refused to bury runs sales-force software behind more than 750 consumer goods brands and reported revenue of ₹90.9 crore ($9.5 million) for the year to March 2025 — and still lost ₹13.6 crore doing it.

Bizom, built by Bengaluru’s Mobisy Technologies, is a case study in surviving twice: once when its original mobile platform was made obsolete overnight, and again when it had to convert a services business into a product nobody had asked for by name. Along the way, a single listed company has quietly bought its way to owning close to a third of the equity. The gap between Bizom’s modest revenue and the conviction of its backers is the real story here.

Quick facts

Company Bizom (Mobisy Technologies Private Limited)
Founded 2008 in Bengaluru; the founders’ earlier mobile venture dates to 2007
Founder(s) Lalit Bhise, Shree Bhise and Vasudeva Manjunath
Businesses Sales-force automation (SFA), distributor management (DMS) and AI-driven retail execution software sold to FMCG/CPG brands
Latest FY revenue ₹90.9 crore in FY25 (year to March 2025), up 15.7% from FY24
Latest FY profit/loss Net loss of ₹13.6 crore in FY25
Listed Private; no IPO announced
Market value / last valuation $23.2 million as of November 2022 (secondary share sale); no valuation disclosed for the December 2024 round
Key shareholders IndiaMART InterMESH (largest external shareholder, stake rising toward ~31.3%), Pavestone Capital, Ojas Venture Partners; CEO Lalit Bhise

What they do

Bizom sells cloud software that gives consumer goods manufacturers visibility into a part of their business they otherwise cannot see: what happens between the factory gate and the shelf of a small, independent store. Its sales-force automation module tracks field representatives who visit retail outlets on behalf of a brand; its distributor management system lets the thousands of local wholesalers who actually stock and deliver goods place and track orders; and its retail execution layer uses photographs and outlet-level data to check whether a product is priced, stocked and displayed the way the brand intended. The customers are packaged food, personal care, dairy, pharmaceutical and other FMCG companies that outsource the physical selling to a large, dispersed, often informal distribution network and need a digital record of what that network is actually doing.

The origin

Lalit Bhise graduated as a computer science engineer in 1999 and worked as a software engineer before moving into an engineering management role at the semiconductor company Infineon Technologies. His first venture, started in early 2007 with four colleagues, built a platform that let ordinary websites behave like native applications on Java and Symbian phones, reaching into features such as GPS and call logs from inside a browser. It was, in effect, an early attempt at what the industry would later call a web app. The insight that became Bizom came later, once Bhise had spent years working alongside consumer goods companies and understood how their supply chains actually moved product: brands had rich data about what left their factories, and almost none about what happened afterwards, because the salespeople and small retailers in between were running on paper and instinct. Validating that gap took, by Bhise’s own account, conversations with more than a hundred business leaders before the product that became Bizom was built.

The struggle years

The company’s first near-death came in February 2010. The smartphone market had moved decisively from Java and Symbian handsets to iOS and Android, and Mobisy’s original platform, built for the world that was disappearing, no longer had a market. Bhise told his team there was less than two months of salary left in the company’s account. Four of his co-founders left within that period; only two employees, including Bhise, remained. What kept the company alive was not a financing round but a decision inside his own household: his wife, Shree Kulkarni, a former IBM employee, chose to join the failing venture rather than tell him to go find a job, on the reasoning that he understood the technology but not how to run a business.

The second struggle was quieter but just as existential: turning a custom software-development shop into a scalable product company. Building bespoke mobile applications for individual clients paid the bills but did not compound, since every new customer meant a new build. The company spent the early 2010s narrowing itself down to a single, repeatable product, and even after Bizom launched in September 2012 following roughly a year of internal development, the business still had to prove the product could sell itself to a brand that had never heard of Mobisy. Winning that early credibility was its own fight: the company has said plainly that being an unknown small vendor was itself an obstacle when it approached its first large customers.

The turning point

The clearest inflection point on the record is the funding round of May 2018. In the two years before it, Mobisy had raised money in small, close-to-the-vest instalments from a single believer, Ojas Venture Partners: a convertible note of $400,000 in December 2016, followed by a seed round of $382,000 in March 2017. That was the entire war chest going into 2018 — a company still essentially bootstrapped, seven years removed from having two employees. On 20 May 2018, Mobisy closed a $3.5 million round, more than four times the size of anything it had raised before, with the explicit ambition of repositioning itself as what its leadership called a “virtual distributor” sitting between brands and retailers rather than simply a reporting tool for field staff. The jump mattered less for the dollar figure than for what it licensed the company to become: a platform business with distributor-facing and retailer-facing products, not just a sales-tracking app for field reps.

The money behind it

Bizom’s capital history is unusually concentrated: one venture fund carried it for its first six years as a funded company, and one strategic investor has since become its dominant external shareholder.

Total funding raised is reported inconsistently across trackers — a sign of how many small, undisclosed-amount rounds sit in Mobisy’s history: Inc42 puts the total at $18.26 million across six rounds as of December 2024, Tracxn puts it at roughly $21 million across nine rounds, and CB Insights lists $16.18 million across ten rounds. All three agree on the broad shape: a company that raised in small increments for a decade before its first double-digit-million round arrived in December 2024. The last publicly disclosed valuation is $23.2 million, set in a November 2022 secondary transaction reported by both Inc42 and CB Insights; neither the December 2024 Series B nor any later round has a disclosed valuation.

How it makes money

Bizom is a business-to-business SaaS company, and its revenue model follows that template closely.

The numbers (₹ crore)

Metric FY24 (year to March 2024) FY25 (year to March 2025)
Revenue ₹78.6 crore ₹90.9 crore (+15.7% YoY)
Total expenses Not found in public disclosures ₹99.2 crore (+10% YoY)
Net profit/(loss) Not found in public disclosures (₹13.6) crore

Public trackers that compile Registrar-of-Companies filings (Inc42 and Tofler) only had FY24 and FY25 figures available at the time of writing; earlier-year revenue and profit/loss numbers for Mobisy Technologies were not found in any source opened for this piece, so they have been left out rather than estimated. Tofler’s broader range — operating revenue of ₹75-100 crore for FY24-25 with growth of about 17.5% — is consistent with Inc42’s more precise figures.

Where the money comes from

The risks

The takeaway

Bizom’s history argues against the idea that a startup’s survival depends on one dramatic rescue. It depends on doing the unglamorous thing twice: once when the underlying technology shifts under you, as it did when smartphones moved from Symbian to Android, and again when the business model itself has to change, as it did when Mobisy gave up building custom apps for individual clients and forced itself into a single repeatable product. Neither moment produced a headline. Both were closer to a household decision — a spouse choosing to stay rather than leave, a founder choosing to shrink the business into something narrower and less immediately lucrative — than to a triumphant pivot memo. Fifteen years and one still-unprofitable income statement later, that is the more honest model of how a durable software company gets built inside a market as unglamorous as Indian offline retail.

Frequently asked questions

What does Bizom actually sell?

Cloud software that FMCG and CPG brands use to run and monitor their field sales teams, manage local distributors, and check whether products are stocked and displayed correctly at the retail outlet level.

Who founded Bizom, and is it true the company almost shut down?

Lalit Bhise, Shree Bhise and Vasudeva Manjunath founded Mobisy Technologies, Bizom’s parent, in 2008, building on an earlier mobile venture Bhise had started in 2007. That earlier venture nearly folded in February 2010 when its Java/Symbian-based platform was made obsolete by the shift to Android and iOS, leaving the company down to two employees.

How much funding has Bizom raised, and who are its main investors?

Estimates vary by tracker, from about $16 million to $21 million in total, raised mostly in small rounds before a $12 million Series B closed in December 2024. Its main backers have been Ojas Venture Partners (from 2012), IndiaMART InterMESH (from around 2020) and Pavestone Capital, which led the 2024 round.

Is Bizom profitable?

No. Per Inc42’s compilation of regulatory filings, Bizom reported a net loss of ₹13.6 crore in FY25 on revenue of ₹90.9 crore, with total expenses of ₹99.2 crore.

What is IndiaMART’s stake in Bizom?

IndiaMART InterMESH, the listed B2B marketplace operator, has built its holding in Mobisy Technologies through repeated investments since around 2020, reaching roughly 31.3% following an investment announced in November 2024 — making it the largest disclosed external shareholder.

Sources

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

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