Accel Partners Backs B2B Infrastructure Marketplace Infra.Market

Mumbai-based infrastructure technology company Infra.Market has announced $3.5 Mn seed funding round from Accel Partners. The funds will be used to expand the company’s product lines.

Prior to this round, the company has raised $1 Mn from angel investors. Founded in 2016 by Aaditya Sharda and Souvik Sengupta, Infra.Market is a B2B online procurement marketplace for real estate and construction materials, with technology as their focal point.

Infra.Market has built a centralised online market for real estate and construction materials that offers fair pricing and an enhanced technology experience to its clients. It does this by aggregating clients’ demands, matching them with its supply chain, and offering economies of scale on material pricing, along with affordable credit options that were earlier not available to individual customers.

“InfraMarket aims to revolutionise the age old construction sector through its full-stack tech driven approach. The company is ideally positioned to power the online-to-offline procurement in the construction industry in the country in the coming years,” said Prashanth Prakash, partner at Accel.

As a technology platform, Infra.Market creates a direct communication chain between its clients and supply chain, ensuring an efficient delivery tracking facility. The startup dishes out a unique and personalised experience for its clients and allots each one of them a dedicated relationship manager to help understand and fulfill their requirements. Currently, the company claims to have a monthly revenue of $2.5 Mn and aims to use the funding to grow its revenue up to $10 Mn monthly.

The company is competing with players such as Moglix, IndustryBuying, OfBusiness, and Power2SME. The industry has a positive outlook with experts forecasting that India is going to be the third largest construction market globally by 2025. In fact, the construction sector has been the second highest recipient of FDI in 2017.

Construction as a sector where companies invest less than 1% of their revenues in adopting new technologies, is ripe for disruption. Further, the adoption of technologies can help greatly enhance the quality, productivity, and output of the industry as a whole.

There are projections that by 2020, the B2B ecommerce market is set to grow at 2.5 times from the present pace to touch $7 Bn. The global B2B ecommerce market will reach $6.7 Tn.