Ofbusiness’s financial services arm Oxyzo turns unicorn

Oxyzo Financial Services, the lending arm of Ofbusiness (an industrial goods procurement firm), has raised $200 million in a maiden Series A round at a $1 billion valuation. Oxyzo has been spun off from Ofbusiness -- which became a unicorn last year -- and has now raised its first large external funding which was led by Tiger Global and AlphaWave Global and also included the participation from Norwest Venture Partners, Matrix Partners, and Creation Investments.

 

The development was confirmed by Vasant Sridhar, the co-founder of Ofbusiness who will oversee the business at Oxyzo along with Ruci Kalra. Oxyzo targets the mid-size businesses and SMEs for customised credit services and claims to be profitable with more than $300 million under assets.

 

The company plans to deploy the funds to target acquisitions, and offer various credit products/ services with enabling tie-ups of lenders with the SMES and offer services including debt capital markets and securities for small businesses.

 

The funds will be used to expand Oxyzo’s digital financial services, scaling the supply chain marketplace, launching innovative fixed income products for the SME space, and scaling other fee incomes business lines including debt capital markets and securities, as per an official statement.

 

Kalra, an IIT Delhi graduate and a former partner at McKinsey, co-founded Ofbusiness with her husband, Asish Mohapatra, in 2016. The firm is currently valued at $5 billion. The company turned into a unicorn last year with a $160 million fund raise led by SoftBank.

 

Notably, this is the largest Series A fund raise by an Indian start-up, having surpassed D2C brands aggregator, Global Bees which had raised $110 million in Series A funding round last year, thereby turning it into an unicorn.

 

Ofbusiness and its spun-off entity Oxyzo will also be the rare set of unicorns which will join the likes of Ola and Ola Electric; Flipkart and its subsdiary PhonePe; Paytm and Paytm Mall; and Glane and InMobi, where the unicorns have spun off other businesses and the subsidiaries themselves have also achieved a billion-dollar valuation.