Indian Startup ‘Bijnis’ Raises 64 Cr in Series A Round

Bijnis, operating in the B2B segment for unorganized retail, raised Rs 63.9 crore in its Series A funding. The funds are mostly invested by Sequoia, Matrix Partners, and its existing investors WaterBridge Ventures and Info Edge.

Sequoia and Matrix had brought with themselves Rs 28 crore each in the round of financing while Info Edge and WaterBridge invested Rs 5.3 crore and Rs 2.16 crore respectively. As per the company’s regulatory filings, it allotted 14,865 Series A CCPS at Rs 42,988 per share with the aim to raise Rs 63.9 crore.

As per the reports, Bijnis which was formerly known as ShoeKonnect is at a valuation of nearly Rs 190 crore, after the allotment was done for fresh equity shares. 

Info Edge will now be the biggest shareholder in Bijnis after the allotment of 28.2% of the equity stake in the company. While Sequoia and Matrix will be a  holder of a 15% stake. Promoter equity holdings came down from 35.69% to 23.47% after the transactions with Water Bridge having a share of 9.85%. Info Edge and WaterBridge also takes the credit of investing Rs 11 crore in the Delhi-based startup in September 2019. Bijnis got its preliminary fundings of around Rs 95 lakh in 2016 from Indian Angel Network, after being bootstrapped for nearly two years. 

In addition to this, the company also passed a special resolution in order to create an employee stock option (ESOP) which consisted of 2,448 equity shares. The reason behind the move was to create an ESOP pool which consisted of a 5.64% stake in the company and currently has the valuation of  Rs 10.53 crore. 

Bijnis is one among the other companies who in their early stage has introduced an ESOP pool  to raise funds this year, among the other names there are Rooter, FleetX, SimSim, Max Wholesale, and several others

The company was founded by Siddharth Vij, Chaitanya Rathi, Siddharth Rastogi, and Shubham Agrawal. The company runs on a very interesting business plan, enabling retailers to purchase from the source without any hassle of price negotiation,  quality assurance, and payment security. The app last year added apparels as one of their categories though the site is only updated with the shoe segment currently.

The company has done a good business and its operating level saw a spike from 6.2X to Rs 37 lakhs in FY18 and then to Rs 2.3 crore in FY19. The company also managed to earn from its logistics which amounted to 56.5% of its revenues and rest came as a commission on sales. 

The company took a good step to achieve the increase in sales by spending a good amount on it, the expenses went up to eightfold from Rs 1.15 crore in FY18 to around Rs 9 crore in FY19. Total expenses spent on fulfillment and transportation of goods came around 52% while 28% were incurred on employee benefits and the other expenses came in the form of operational costs. 

The increasing expenses had an adverse effect, and losses in the P/L account rose  8.5X, from Rs 78.5 lakhs to Rs 6.7 crore in FY19. Bijnis made an expenditure of around Rs 3.93 to earn a rupee in the form of revenue in FY19, For FY18 it spent 25.5% more to earn a rupee when compared to FY19.