"Whatever is unsexy, there's more profit. Everybody wants to be glamorous, so that's where the competition is."

Before Titan

The company started with a problem Asish couldn't solve as an investor.

He spent five years at Matrix Partners covering healthcare, sitting on seven boards. Before that, McKinsey. Before that, operations at ITC. From that seat he watched the same business fail in the same place. Companies would build the procurement side and stall on credit. Or they would go at credit without the transaction data to underwrite it. Nobody was doing both.

He left in 2015. Ruchi Kalra left McKinsey, where she had spent close to a decade in financial services and where the two had met. Bhuvan Gupta came from Snapdeal, where he had run engineering.

The plan was to sell industrial raw materials like steel, cement, chemicals to small manufacturers, and to lend them the money to buy it. In 2015, Indian venture capital was funding consumer apps.

The bet

We invested at seed, in 2015.

What the market wanted from B2B then was asset-light. Marketplaces, take rates, nothing on the balance sheet. OfBusiness intended to buy the materials, hold the inventory, and eventually lend off its own book. None of that fit what investors were looking for.

What we could see was the team. Between them they had covered this market from consulting, corporate operations, engineering and venture, and they had all left good jobs to go and sell chemicals to factories in tier-two cities.

They had also settled how they would run it before they had to. No loss-making transactions. No discounting to buy growth. Frugality as a rule rather than a phase.

The hard part

Over six months in 2016, 73 investors said no.

Asish has talked about it since and is matter-of-fact about the reasons. Commerce and lending together looked like two businesses. A first-time founder taking credit risk was a harder thing to back.

The founders did not respond by making the company easier to fund.

Banks were taking weeks to clear credit for a small manufacturer, and by the time a limit came through the purchase order had gone elsewhere. Ruchi has described the decision plainly: they were losing orders waiting for lenders, so they built the lender. Oxyzo started inside OfBusiness, underwriting against the transaction data already moving through the commerce platform. It was the most capital-intensive and most regulated version of the plan available to them.

Then it was tested. In March 2020 supply chains stopped, and the group was carrying credit exposure across thousands of small manufacturers with no orders coming in. This was the scenario every asset-light investor had warned about. Through that period, bad loans stayed at roughly one per cent of the book.

Collections were never treated as a back-office function. Asish has run them himself from the beginning.

What it became

Oxyzo stopped being an internal facility and became a business. It began lending to companies outside the platform, has been profitable from early on, and raised its own round in March 2022 at a valuation above a billion dollars. Ruchi, who runs it, was described at the time as the first woman in India to found a profitable fintech unicorn.

OfBusiness itself became a unicorn in 2021 and was valued at around $5 billion within months. Several of the funds paying a premium for the complicated version of the business had passed on the simple one a few years earlier.

In FY26 the group reported ₹20,645 crore in revenue and ₹724 crore in profit, and crossed ₹10,000 crore in lending assets. Headcount passed 30,000, roughly double the previous year. Across the company's manufacturing units, about half the workforce is women, most of them hired from the areas around the plants.

None of that is why the story is here. 2016 is. A business that 73 investors declined to fund became profitable and stayed profitable, without changing the thing they had all objected to.

In their words

If you're building something before the numbers exist to prove it works, write to us at startups@titancapital.vc.