Startup Deep Dive : Moglix — unprofitable for a decade, valued at $2.6bn, now racing to IPO

Moglix has never closed a full financial year in profit since Rahul Garg founded it in 2015 – and yet investors have valued the company at $2.6 billion (about ₹250 crore raised in a single round in January 2022), and it is now racing to list on Indian stock exchanges by 2027.

The contradiction sits right in the numbers. In the year to March 2024, Moglix earned ₹4,964 crore in revenue from selling nuts, bolts, safety gear and machine parts to factories – and still spent ₹1.11 to bring in every ₹1 of that revenue. This is the story of how a trading business with wafer-thin margins became one of India’s best-funded industrial start-ups, and what it will take to turn a decade of losses into an initial public offering.

Quick facts

What they do

Moglix runs a business-to-business marketplace for the unglamorous end of Indian industry: fasteners, bearings, safety gear, power tools, pipes, welding equipment and the thousands of other maintenance, repair and operations (MRO) items that keep a factory or construction site running. Its buyers are manufacturers and enterprises across automotive, cement, chemicals, consumer durables and FMCG, along with smaller manufacturing units – it says it serves customers across roughly 3,000 manufacturing plants through a network of about 40 warehouses in India, Singapore, the UK and the UAE, as reported by Wikipedia’s company profile. Around it, Moglix has built two adjacent businesses: Credlix, a supply chain financing arm that advances working capital to suppliers, and, more recently, a push into owning manufacturing capacity itself through its 2024 acquisition of the paper and packaging maker Khatema Fibres.

The origin

Rahul Garg spent five years at Google, most recently running its AdX advertising exchange business across India, Southeast Asia and Korea, before he left to start Moglix in 2015. His insight, as widely reported around the company’s founding, was that India’s manufacturing supply chains were still running on paper catalogues, unorganised local distributors and phone-and-fax purchase orders, even as consumer e-commerce was digitising retail. Garg bet that the same discovery, pricing and delivery efficiencies Flipkart and Amazon had brought to consumers could be applied to industrial buying – a market that was larger than consumer e-commerce but far less contested. Moglix began operations in August 2015, and within two months had already attracted seed backing from Accel Partners and, notably, Ratan Tata, according to Wikipedia’s account of the company’s history – an early signal that Indian industrial capital, not just venture funds, saw the idea as credible.

The struggle years

Moglix’s setbacks have been less about near-collapse and more about a business model that refused to become profitable even as it scaled. Two are well documented. First, growth itself stalled sharply: after revenue from operations jumped 83% to ₹4,704 crore in FY23, it grew just 5.5% to ₹4,964 crore in FY24 – the sharpest deceleration in the company’s disclosed financial history, as Entrackr’s FY24 filing analysis showed. Second, that slowdown showed up directly in headcount: Moglix cut around 40 jobs, roughly 2-3% of its workforce, in early 2023, following annual appraisals, according to HR industry publication HRKatha – implying a workforce of somewhere between 1,300 and 2,000 people at the time.

Underneath both events sits a harder truth the company has openly acknowledged: Moglix chased growth over profitability through most of its first decade, and it stayed unprofitable in every year for which financials are public. Losses did not spiral – Entrackr’s FY24 filing review put the FY24 net loss at ₹189 crore, down 16% from the prior year – but a company that has raised roughly half a billion dollars and been valued at $2.6 billion still had not produced an annual profit ten years after founding.

The turning point

The clearest inflection came in 2021. Covid-19 forced Indian manufacturers who had resisted digital procurement to try it out of necessity, and Moglix rode that shift into a $120 million Series E round in May 2021 that made it a unicorn at a $1 billion valuation – one of three Indian B2B unicorns (alongside OfBusiness and Infra.Market) minted within a five-month window that year, according to Inc42’s reporting on the sector. Moglix used the moment to move beyond pure trading: in the same year it acquired the used-machinery marketplace Vendaxo, launched the supply chain financing platform Credlix, and bought the Singapore export-import fintech NuPhi. The bet paid off on the top line – revenue jumped from about $306.9 million in FY22 to $560.4 million in FY23, an 83% rise, per Inc42’s FY23 financial report – but the underlying trading business remained loss-making throughout, which is the tension that defines Moglix to this day: a company that can accelerate revenue rapidly, but has struggled to make that scale translate into margin.

The money behind it

Moglix has raised in the region of $470 million across roughly nine rounds from about 32 investors, according to multiple funding trackers. Three backers stand out for what each brought. Ratan Tata came in as a seed-stage investor in 2015-16, lending the venture credibility with India’s manufacturing establishment at a time it had no revenue to show. Accel Partners was there from the earliest pre-Series A rounds and stayed through the growth rounds, anchoring Moglix’s institutional venture backing. Tiger Global led the $60 million round that helped Moglix scale nationally, and later co-led the January 2022 Series F alongside Alpha Wave Global; by FY24, Tiger Global (14.75%) and Accel (14.26%) were Moglix’s two largest shareholders after the founder.

That Series F, announced on 27 January 2022, raised $250 million and valued Moglix at $2.6 billion (approximately ₹19,760 crore at the FX rate below) – more than double the $1 billion mark it had crossed just eight months earlier, according to both Entrackr and BusinessToday’s contemporaneous coverage of the round. Early seed investors were reported to have booked an 80x return on paper at that valuation. No priced round has been reported since, so $2.6 billion remains the last confirmed mark – a number the company will have to justify, up or down, whenever it eventually prices an IPO.

How it makes money

The detail most people get wrong about Moglix is assuming it works like a classic marketplace, taking a commission while manufacturers hold the inventory and risk. It does not. Moglix runs what Entrackr’s financial reporting calls a “cash-and-carry” model: it buys industrial goods from manufacturers and distributors, holds them (or arranges direct-ship), and resells them to enterprise buyers, booking the full sale price as revenue rather than a slice of it. In FY24, sale of traded goods made up 98.98% of Moglix’s operating revenue, with commissions, IT services and financing-related income accounting for the rest, per Entrackr’s breakdown of the FY24 filing.

That structure explains both Moglix’s scale and its thin margins in one stroke. Because it is booking gross transaction value, not a take rate, its revenue line looks like a much bigger company than a pure-play marketplace would at the same order volume – but its costs move almost one-for-one with revenue, since procurement of goods is by far its largest expense line (₹4,620 crore of ₹5,493 crore total expenses in FY24, or 84%, according to Entrackr). On top of the core trading business, Credlix adds a financing layer – it earns interest spreads and processing fees by advancing early payment to suppliers against invoices, a model its own website describes as collateral-free working capital financing – and the 2024 purchase of Khatema Fibres, a sustainable paper and packaging manufacturer with 50,000-tonne annual capacity, is a step toward owning some of the supply it used to just resell, according to reporting on the ₹80 crore deal by Inc42 and Entrepreneur India.

The numbers

Figures below combine Moglix’s own reported operating revenue and net loss across four fiscal years, drawn from Entrackr’s and Inc42’s reviews of the company’s regulatory filings. FY25 figures were reported in US dollars and are converted here at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 (18 September 2026, Trading Economics); all earlier years are the rupee figures as filed.

The ranges for FY22 and FY23 are not a typo – they reflect a real conflict in the public record. Entrackr’s October 2023 review of the FY23 filing put that year’s net loss at ₹193 crore and FY22’s at ₹219 crore; Inc42’s FY23 report, drawing on the same filing, converted the figures to ₹196 crore and ₹175.3 crore respectively; and Entrackr’s later December 2024 comparison, benchmarking FY24 against a restated FY23, put the FY23 loss at ₹225 crore. Rather than pick one and hide the gap, both are shown here. What is not in dispute is the direction: Moglix’s EBITDA margin improved from -5.28% in FY22 to -2.80% in FY23 to -1.5% in FY24, according to Entrackr’s filing reviews, and its FY25 loss of $11.3 million was roughly half the $21.7 million it lost in FY24, per Inc42 – a company still losing money, but losing meaningfully less of it per rupee of revenue each year.

Where the money comes from

Geographically, Moglix is still an almost entirely Indian revenue story despite a decade of talk about global expansion. In FY24, India accounted for 97.1% of operating revenue, with the United States contributing 2.7% and Singapore 0.16%, according to Entrackr’s filing breakdown; a year earlier, in FY23, the split was India 98.26%, the UAE 1.42% and Singapore 0.32%. The company’s own Inc42 profile puts FY25’s non-India share at around 3%, coming mostly from the UAE. The surprise is less about geography and more about the product mix behind it: nearly all of that revenue – 98.98% in FY24 – is the sale of physical traded goods, not software, financing or logistics fees, even though Credlix, Moglix’s SaaS procurement tools and its newer manufacturing assets are the parts of the business investors are told will carry the next phase of growth.

The risks

Three risks stand out, each with a clear mechanism rather than a vague warning. The first is structural: because Moglix’s core business is trading physical goods rather than charging a marketplace commission, its ceiling on margin is set by procurement costs it does not fully control, and rivals such as OfBusiness and Infra.Market – which also grew out of the 2021 B2B unicorn wave – have already reached profitability while Moglix has not, as Inc42’s company profile notes; if that gap persists into an IPO process, public investors are likely to price Moglix at a discount to peers. The second is operational: industrial buyers frequently order the wrong specification or reject shipments on arrival, and Moglix’s return rate runs at roughly 20%, a level Inc42’s reporting flags as a direct drag on margins in a catalogue business that spans thousands of SKUs. The third is geopolitical: a meaningful share of the machinery, tools and components Moglix sources runs through Chinese supply chains, and any tightening of trade relations or tariffs between India and China could disrupt availability or pricing with little notice, per the same Inc42 analysis.

The takeaway

Moglix’s decade is a reminder that revenue scale and business quality are not the same thing, and that investors can fund the gap between them for a surprisingly long time when the underlying market is large enough. Booking ₹4,964 crore of revenue sounds like proof of product-market fit; booking it while spending ₹1.11 to earn every rupee is proof only that the company can move goods, not that it has found a margin structure to defend. The lesson for any founder building a trading or aggregation business is to be honest, early, about which number actually indicates health – revenue growth, or the spread between what you pay and what you charge – because public markets, unlike late-stage venture rounds, will eventually insist on asking the second question.

Frequently asked questions

What does Moglix actually sell?

Industrial and MRO goods – fasteners, safety equipment, power tools, pipes, bearings and similar items – which it buys from manufacturers and distributors and resells to enterprise and manufacturing customers across sectors such as automotive, cement, chemicals and FMCG.

Is Moglix profitable?

No. Moglix has reported a net loss in every fiscal year for which financials are public, most recently a loss of $11.3 million in FY25 (year ended March 2025), though that loss has narrowed sharply from $21.7 million in FY24, per Inc42’s reporting on the company’s filings.

What is Moglix’s valuation?

Its last reported valuation is $2.6 billion, set at a $250 million Series F round in January 2022, according to Entrackr and BusinessToday’s coverage of that round. No priced funding round has been reported since.

Who are Moglix’s biggest investors?

As of FY24 filings reviewed by Entrackr, Tiger Global held 14.75%, Accel 14.26% and Alpha Wave Global 13.35%, with founder Rahul Garg holding 12.67%. Ratan Tata was an early backer from around 2015-16, and Sequoia Capital and the International Finance Corporation have also invested.

Is Moglix going public?

The company is targeting an IPO in India in late 2026 or 2027 and is in the process of redomiciling (“reverse flipping”) from Singapore to India ahead of that listing, according to Inc42’s reporting and Moglix’s own statements on its business news page.

Sources

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

• Entrackr, “With Rs 4,964 Cr revenue, Moglix reports flat growth in FY24,” December 2024
• Entrackr, “Moglix’s gross scale spikes 83% to Rs 4,500 Cr in FY23; losses down,” October 2023
• Entrackr, “Moglix raises $250 Mn at $2.6 Bn valuation,” January 2022
• Inc42, “Moglix FY25: Revenue Inches Closer To $700 Mn Mark, Loss Halves,” September 2026
• Inc42, “Moglix FY23 Revenue Jumps To $560 Mn, Founder Sells Shares Worth $10 Mn,” 2023
• Inc42, “Away From The Buzz: How Moglix Built A $700 Mn Global B2B Marketplace,” 2026
• BusinessToday, “Moglix’s valuation zooms to $2.6 billion with $250 million funds raise,” January 2022
• Wikipedia, “Moglix,” accessed September 2026
• HRKatha, “Moglix begins 2023 with layoffs,” 2023
• Entrepreneur India, “Moglix Acquires Khatema Fibres for INR 80 Cr to Expand Sustainable Packaging Portfolio,” November 2024
• TechStory, “Moglix Secures $12.3 Mn from Singapore Parent Amid Plans for India Domicile Shift and IPO,” 2026
• Credlix, “About Us,” credlix.com, accessed September 2026

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