Dinesh Agarwal

Building India’s largest marketplace for SMEs

When Dinesh Agarwal started IndiaMART with a seed capital of INR. 40,000, his vision was to build something for small businesses in India, using the internet. From a website creation business to a searchable online directory for exporters, to a domestic marketplace, Agarwal kept on honing the business model to provide maximum value to its customers.

From borrowing money from a friend to register the domain name in the US to facing business disruptions after 9/11, Agarwal’s journey is a rare startup story that successfully survived the internet boom and the bust, and in the process, transformed the way India does businesses. After witnessing a successful IPO and having recently raised funds through QIP for further expansion IndiaMART stands as the largest online B2B marketplace in the country with more than 6.4 million suppliers, 119 million buyers, and 71 million products and services listed on the platform. Today, the company has a market capitalization of over INR 20,000 crores.

In this more than two-decades-long journey, Agarwal has emphasized the need to boost small businesses in the country, which are the backbone of the Indian economy. He aims at enabling millions of small businesses with an easy-to-use, cost-effective, and tech-enabled solution.

Agarwal has played a pivotal role in establishing IndiaMART as a one-stop destination for all business requirements. With IndiaMART, he has tried to enhance ease of doing business India by introducing price discovery, payment protection program, lead management system, cloud telephony, voice, and multilingual search, and supplier reviews and ratings. All this essentially made doing business easy which is what the company visions and stands for.