If there is one company watching the rise of B2B unicorns with unbridled envy, it has to be Indiamart. The online classifieds platform has been at it for 25 years and went public in 2019, when listed internet companies were a rare breed in India.
But it commands a market capitalisation of just under $2 billion, while seven-year-old Of Business, a raw materials procurement platform and supply chain financier, is worth more than 2.5X that.
After all, classifieds are so yesterday! And Indiamart knows it. Hence its desire to offer the following to its merchants: software-as-a-service (SaaS), payments, logistics/tracking, and transaction financing solutions.
Over the past year, it has invested in eight new companies, including an autonomous procurement platform, an inventory and warehouse management solution company, a shipment tracking outfit, and a fleet digitization company.
But, The Mumbai Multimedia Studio argues in our articles today that Indiamart is in no hurry to give up on classifieds and is nowhere near as aggressive as its venture capital-backed rivals. When 'doddering' is the word used to describe you all this while, you have to do quite a lot before people start calling you spry
