Startup Deep Dive : Metalbook — how a metals marketplace crossed Rs 1,300 crore revenue and stayed in the red

Metalbook moved ₹1,327 crore (about $138 million) worth of steel, aluminium and copper through its platform in FY25, and still ended the year in the red. That is the paradox at the centre of this Gurugram company: revenue that has more than doubled in two years, sitting on top of a business that earns roughly one rupee of gross margin for every hundred rupees of metal it shifts.

Metalbook is a B2B marketplace for the least glamorous, most physical corner of Indian industry, raw metals. It is trying to digitise a trade still run on phone calls, WhatsApp quotes and personal relationships, and it is doing so at commodity-thin margins where the difference between growth and survival is working capital, not clever software. This piece traces how a founder from a Tata Steel plant floor built a ₹1,300-crore-revenue company in four years, and why scale alone has not yet made it profitable.

Quick facts

What Metalbook does

Metalbook runs a business-to-business platform that sits between metal producers and the buyers who consume metal, connecting mills, dealers and scrap suppliers on one side with manufacturers, fabricators and construction firms on the other. It is not a software subscription; it takes ownership of the transaction, sourcing the metal and delivering it, which is why its reported revenue is measured in hundreds of crores rather than SaaS fees.

• Sells physical metal: ferrous (steel and steel products) and non-ferrous (aluminium, copper, and scrap), plus contract manufacturing of finished components.
• Serves manufacturers, fabricators, infrastructure and construction firms; the company states it works with 350-plus customers and over 500 suppliers across 80 geographies (company-stated, February 2024).
• Bundles logistics, quality checks, e-auctioning of surplus inventory, scrap recycling and short-term trade credit around each order.
• Names ArcelorMittal, Nippon Steel, Tata Steel and JSW among its counterparties (company-stated) — claims not independently audited here.

The founding insight

The idea came off a plant floor. Pulkit Baldev, an engineer who had worked at Tata Steel and then run purchasing at OfBusiness (OFB Tech), had watched India’s steel trade run on a stack of phone calls and WhatsApp screenshots: a buyer would ring three dealers, collect quotes, haggle, and hope the material that turned up matched the order. He described the sector as operating “in a low-tech manner,” and reasoned that a market this large and this manual was ripe for a digital layer.

He founded Metalbook in May 2021 with two people he knew well: Aman Kumar Tibrewal, who came from a family in the steel-trading business and had worked at JK Tyre, and Raghavendra Pratap Singh, a Delhi Technological University graduate with operating experience at Uber, RedDoorz and Loconav. The three combined metals-domain knowledge with the playbook of Indian B2B commerce platforms and looked abroad for proof the model could work, pointing to metals marketplaces such as Reibus in the United States and Zhaogang in China. The founding bet was simple to state and hard to execute: aggregate a fragmented supply base, standardise the transaction, and earn a spread by making the trade faster and more reliable than the phone-call status quo.

The struggle years

A metals marketplace is a working-capital machine, and in its first two years that machine kept running short of fuel. Two constraints dominated the early period.

The first was trust. Buyers and sellers who had transacted on relationships for decades were reluctant to route large-value orders through an unknown platform, so the founders had to underwrite credibility personally. Baldev has described spending his early days managing cash flow and fielding customer queries himself, closing deals by reputation before the brand existed.

The second, and more dangerous, was capital. Because Metalbook buys and delivers the metal, every order ties up cash between paying the supplier and collecting from the customer. By mid-2022 the company was turning away orders it could not fund — demand outran the balance sheet. Growth was not the problem; financing that growth was. That is the recurring near-death risk for any inventory-heavy marketplace: run out of working capital and the revenue simply stops, regardless of how many customers want to buy. The pivot that followed was less a change of product than a change of plumbing — layering in debt lines and trade-finance partners so orders no longer died for want of cash.

The turning point

The clearest inflection is visible in the revenue line once the funding and financing pieces came together. Operating revenue moved from ₹452 crore in FY23 to ₹796 crore in FY24, then to ₹1,327 crore in FY25 — a jump of about 76% and then 66.7% in consecutive years (Entrackr, from MCA filings). The $15 million Series A announced in February 2024, alongside a debt facility from Northern Arc, gave the company the balance-sheet room to stop rationing orders and instead chase volume, particularly in non-ferrous metals and scrap.

The number on the other side of that turning point matters just as much: growth did not fix the margin. The operating loss was ₹9.7 crore in FY24 and ₹9.8 crore in FY25 (Entrackr). In other words, Metalbook nearly tripled its revenue over two years while the operating loss barely moved — evidence that the model can scale volume, but that scale by itself does not yet produce profit in a business where procurement eats almost every rupee that comes in.

The money behind it

Metalbook’s cap table mixes early venture backers with metals-focused and marketplace investors, plus debt to fund inventory. The main disclosed rounds:

• Seed — $5 million, August 2022: led by Axilor Ventures, with Foundamental, RTP Global and Stride Ventures participating (company and Inc42, 2022).
• Series A — $15 million, announced February 2024: led by Rigel Capital, with FJ Labs joining and existing backers Axilor, Foundamental, Stride Ventures and Trifecta Capital following on (Inc42, February 2024).
• Debt financing — about $3 million, April 2024: from Northern Arc, earmarked for working capital (Inc42 funding data).

On totals and valuation the public trackers disagree, so both are given here:

• Total raised: reported between roughly $24 million and $53 million across five rounds, the higher figure including debt and working-capital facilities rather than pure equity (Tracxn; Inc42, 2026).
• Valuation: about ₹1,200 crore, roughly $140 million, estimated as of mid-2025 by data platform Tracxn — an estimate, not a company-disclosed round valuation. An earlier peak of about $141 million was recorded around August 2022.

What each backer changed is instructive: Axilor’s seed gave the founders permission to leave the phone-call market and build; Rigel Capital and FJ Labs — the latter a specialist in marketplaces — validated the model to metals buyers at Series A; and Northern Arc’s debt addressed the specific constraint that had been strangling growth, the cost of carrying inventory.

How it makes money

Metalbook earns a spread on physical trade rather than a fee for access, which shapes everything about its economics.

• Money in: it buys metal from mills, dealers and scrap suppliers and resells it to manufacturers and builders, booking the full sale value as revenue. Add-on services — logistics, e-auctions of surplus stock, scrap processing and trade credit — layer on top.
• Costs out: procurement dominates. In FY25 the cost of metal bought was ₹1,303 crore, about 95.6% of total costs (Entrackr). Employee costs were ₹16 crore in FY24, a small slice next to procurement.
• Where the margin sits: in the thin gap between buy and sell price, plus fees on financing and services. The company’s expense-to-revenue ratio held at 1.03x in both FY24 and FY25 — it spent about ₹1.03 for every ₹1 of revenue (Entrackr).
• The part people get wrong: the headline “₹1,327 crore revenue” is gross trade value, not a software top line. On a take-rate basis the retained margin is low single digits, which is why an operating loss of under ₹10 crore sits beneath a revenue figure in the four figures of crores.

The numbers

Three years of audited figures, sourced from Entrackr’s reading of Metalbook’s MCA filings. All figures in ₹ crore.

• Revenue growth: about 76% in FY24 and 66.7% in FY25 (Entrackr).
• FY25 total income was ₹1,332 crore against total expenses of ₹1,362 crore; the EBITDA margin was -0.7%, flat versus FY24 (Entrackr).
• FY24 net loss widened to ₹17 crore from ₹6 crore in FY23, largely on higher procurement and financing costs; the operating loss that year was ₹9.7 crore (Entrackr).
• FY24 total assets and cash: current assets ₹193 crore and cash and bank balances of ₹61 crore; by FY25, cash and bank balances stood at about ₹77.5 crore on total assets of ₹245 crore (Entrackr).

Where the money comes from

The revenue mix in FY25 shows a business still anchored in steel but growing fastest away from it.

• Ferrous commodities: ₹938 crore, about 71% of operating revenue, up roughly 33% year on year (Entrackr, FY25). Steel remains the core.
• Non-ferrous commodities and other operating activities: ₹389 crore in FY25, reported at close to 4x the prior year — the fast-growing segment, driven by the push into copper, aluminium and scrap flagged at the Series A (Entrackr; company, February 2024).

The surprise is where growth is coming from. The company built its name and volume in ferrous metals, but the non-ferrous and services line grew several times faster in FY25, which is what a diversifying marketplace wants to see: it lowers dependence on a single commodity cycle and tends to carry richer margins than commodity steel. The offsetting concern is concentration on the cost side — one line item, procurement, still accounts for more than 95% of spend, so the whole model lives or dies on sourcing discipline.

The risks

• Structurally thin margins. With an expense-to-revenue ratio of 1.03x and procurement at 95.6% of costs (Entrackr, FY25), there is almost no buffer. A small adverse move in metal prices between purchase and sale can turn a profitable order into a loss, because the retained spread is so narrow.
• Working-capital intensity. Because Metalbook takes ownership of inventory, growth consumes cash: every extra crore of sales needs financing between paying suppliers and collecting from buyers. The company already had to turn away orders for lack of capital in 2022, and it now leans on debt (Northern Arc) to fund the gap — which adds interest cost and refinancing risk.
• Commodity and demand cyclicality. Revenue is tied to steel and metals prices and to construction and manufacturing demand. A downturn in those end markets, or volatile metal prices, hits both volume and the spread at once.
• Customer and counterparty credit. Extending trade credit to buyers exposes the company to defaults; FY24 already carried ₹3.7 crore of bad-debt provisions (Entrackr), a figure worth watching as the book scales.

The takeaway

Metalbook’s story is a clean lesson in the economics of physical marketplaces: revenue is the easy part, margin is the hard part. Digitising a phone-call trade can produce enormous top-line numbers quickly, because you book the full value of the goods, but it does not change the underlying truth that commodities carry thin spreads and heavy working-capital needs. The transferable insight for anyone building in B2B commerce is to judge these businesses by retained margin and cash conversion, not by gross trade value — and to treat access to cheap, reliable financing as the real product, because in a trade where you earn a rupee on every hundred, the company that can fund the most orders at the lowest cost of capital wins.

Frequently asked questions

What is Metalbook?

Metalbook is a Gurugram-based B2B platform for the metals supply chain. It sources and sells steel and non-ferrous metals, and adds services such as contract manufacturing, scrap recycling, logistics, e-auctions and trade finance. The legal entity is MBOOK Technology Private Limited.

Who founded Metalbook and when?

It was founded in May 2021 by Pulkit Baldev, Aman Kumar Tibrewal and Raghavendra Pratap Singh. Baldev previously worked at Tata Steel and ran purchasing at OfBusiness; the legal entity was incorporated in December 2020.

How much revenue does Metalbook make?

Operating revenue was ₹1,327 crore in FY25, up from ₹796 crore in FY24 and ₹452 crore in FY23, according to Entrackr’s reading of the company’s MCA filings.

Is Metalbook profitable?

Not yet. It reported an operating loss of ₹9.8 crore in FY25 and a net loss of ₹17 crore in FY24. Its expense-to-revenue ratio was 1.03x, meaning it spent about ₹1.03 for every ₹1 of revenue (Entrackr).

How much funding has Metalbook raised?

It has raised a $5 million seed (2022, led by Axilor Ventures), a $15 million Series A (announced February 2024, led by Rigel Capital with FJ Labs) and about $3 million in debt from Northern Arc (2024). Trackers report total funding between roughly $24 million and $53 million, the higher figure including debt.

Sources

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

• Entrackr — “Metalbook’s gross revenue crosses Rs 1,300 Cr in FY25” (FY25 revenue, segment split, expenses, operating loss), 2025
• Entrackr — “Metalbook nears Rs 800 Cr gross revenue in FY24” (FY24 and FY23 revenue, net loss, cost breakdown), 2024
• Inc42 — “Metalbook Nets $15 Mn To Bridge Metal Industry Supply Chain Gap” (Series A, investors, business model), February 2024
• Inc42 — Metalbook company and funding profile (funding rounds, total raised, investors), 2026
• Forbes India — “Pulkit Baldev wants to rewire the steel industry with Metalbook” (founding story, background, early struggles), 30 Under 30, 2023
• Tracxn — MBOOK Technology Private Limited legal-entity profile and Metalbook company profile (legal entity, CIN, valuation estimate, shareholding, headcount), 2026

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