In August 1995, while thousands of Indian software engineers dreamt of building careers in America, one engineer quietly decided to return home and chase something far more uncertain. India had just formally opened internet access to the public. For most Indians, the internet was still an alien concept.
For 26-year-old Dinesh Agarwal, however, it looked like the beginning of a commercial revolution. At the time, Agarwal already had what middle-class India considered success. He had studied computer science and engineering at Harcourt Butler Technological Institute (HBTI), Kanpur, worked on prestigious national technology projects in India and later moved to the United States through HCL Technologies. In America, he worked with companies such as Bank of America and Novell during the first wave of the global technology boom. The logical thing would have been to stay there, continue climbing the corporate ladder and build a comfortable NRI life.
Instead, he came back. That decision would eventually create IndiaMART, today India’s leading online B2B marketplace and one of India’s rare internet companies that has combined scale, profitability, cash generation and long-term relevance over nearly three decades.
Agarwal’s original spark came from his exposure to the early internet economy in the US. Back then, most people in India had not even seen the internet. But he was convinced information access would fundamentally change the way businesses buy and sell. The opportunity was not in creating a website. The opportunity was in digitising business discovery itself.
Understanding scale, systems
Born on 19 February 1969 in Nanpara in Uttar Pradesh’s Bahraich district, Agarwal grew up in a modest setting where ambition had to compete with limited exposure and resources. He studied at Maharaja Agrasen Vidyalaya Inter College in Lucknow before moving to Kanpur for engineering. His early career mirrored India’s own technology ambitions. At CMC Limited, he worked on the country’s early railway reservation systems project. Later, at C-DOT, he became part of the Rural Automatic Exchange project aimed at expanding India’s telecom infrastructure. Those assignments shaped his understanding of scale and systems. But it was the internet that fundamentally altered his thinking.
When India launched public internet services on 15 August 1995, Agarwal returned to India and started IndiaMART from a modest house in Delhi’s Patparganj. The original idea was deceptively simple. IndiaMART would help Indian businesses display products online through digital catalogues and web pages, enabling buyers and suppliers to discover each other without geographical barriers.
Today that sounds obvious. In the mid-1990s, it sounded almost absurd. India barely had internet users. SMEs depended on trade fairs, print directories, middlemen and personal networks. Convincing a small business owner in Rajkot, Ludhiana or Coimbatore to pay for an internet listing was incredibly difficult because many of them had never even used a computer. Those years demanded persistence more than vision.
For nearly 10 years, IndiaMART largely operated as an export-oriented discovery platform, helping Indian manufacturers connect with overseas buyers. The business survived the dotcom crash that wiped out hundreds of internet start-ups globally because IndiaMART was built patiently and frugally rather than chasing speculative growth.
Then came another turning point. After the 9/11 attacks and the global trade slowdown, export demand weakened sharply. IndiaMART responded by pivoting towards domestic SMEs and India’s internal business economy. Instead of focusing mainly on exports, the company began building a digital marketplace for Indian buyers and suppliers themselves.
“That pivot changed everything,” says Dinesh Gulati, COO, IndiaMART. “We realised India itself was becoming one of the world’s largest business-opportunity markets. Once SMEs began digitising, the network effects became extremely powerful.”
That strategic shift transformed IndiaMART from a niche internet company into a foundational layer of India’s MSME ecosystem. Over time, the platform evolved far beyond online listings. Suppliers could now create digital storefronts, upload catalogues, receive buyer enquiries, manage leads, communicate through CRM tools and increasingly conduct large parts of their business online.
For entrepreneurs like Hardik Kardani of Ahmedabad-based Kardani Engineering, the platform became a growth engine long before digital marketing became mainstream. Kardani recalls travelling across cities on a motorcycle in the company’s early years, struggling to build visibility with limited liquidity. Despite financial constraints, the company invested heavily in IndiaMART listings because it believed in the platform’s reach. That gamble paid off. New customers steadily arrived through the marketplace, helping the engineering firm scale rapidly. Today, Kardani Engineering has a turnover of nearly R30 crore and expects to approach Rs100 crore in the coming years.
Today, IndiaMART has more than 41 million active buyers, 8.7 million supplier storefronts and nearly 129 million live product listings spread across almost 98,000 categories ranging from industrial machinery and chemicals to pharmaceuticals, textiles, electronics, agriculture and construction materials.
Beyond metros
Nearly half of its buyer base now comes from beyond major metro cities, deeply penetrating Tier-II and Tier-III markets. “The scale looks large now, but our biggest strength is diversity,” says Gulati, who has been associated with the company for 14 years. An MBA from FMS Delhi and a BTech from HBTI Kanpur, Gulati has previously held leadership roles at Bharti Airtel, Reliance Communications, Kodak India and The Indian Express Group.
“No single geography, category or customer dominates the platform. That creates resilience,” he says. That resilience is visible in the company’s financials as well.
In FY26, IndiaMART reported consolidated revenue from operations of Rs1,569 crore, collections of Rs1,857 crore and EBITDA of Rs530 crore, with margins of 34 per cent. Net profit stood at Rs475 crore, while operating cash flow reached Rs694 crore. The company ended the year with cash and investments exceeding Rs3,280 crore.
What makes these numbers especially notable is that IndiaMART achieved them while remaining consistently profitable and debt-free – something few Indian internet companies can claim.
Unlike venture-funded start-ups that prioritised customer acquisition at any cost, IndiaMART built a subscription-led model where suppliers pay annual or multi-year fees for premium listings, lead access, RFQ visibility and business tools. “We have always focused on building a sustainable business instead of chasing vanity metrics,” says Gulati. “The discipline came from surviving multiple economic and technology cycles.”
Public markets eventually began rewarding that discipline. IndiaMART’s market debut became a defining moment for India’s internet economy. The company opened its Rs474-crore IPO between 24-26 June 2019, entirely through an offer-for-sale route, signalling management’s confidence in a business that was already profitable and cash-generating – a rarity among Indian internet ventures at the time. Priced at Rs970-973 a share, the issue drew an overwhelming investor response and was subscribed nearly 36 times.
When IndiaMART listed on the bourses on 4 July 2019, the stock delivered a blockbuster debut, opening at Rs1,973 on the BSE and Rs1,920 on the NSE – almost double the issue price. The spectacular listing underscored investor belief that India’s SME digitisation story had finally found a scalable and sustainable internet platform.
The stock later surged to a 52-week high of Rs2,799, buoyed by growing investor optimism around India’s SME digitisation drive and the expanding AI-powered commerce landscape. Following a stock split, the scrip was trading at Rs2,017.30 as of 12 June 2026. IndiaMART continues to enjoy strong investor confidence, backed by its debt-free balance sheet, robust cash generation and strategic position at the heart of India’s rapidly expanding digital business ecosystem.
“The IPO validated that profitable internet businesses could exist in India,” says Gulati. “At that time, many internet companies globally were still burning cash aggressively. Investors recognised that our model was fundamentally different.”
For exporters too, IndiaMART became a democratising force. Delhi-based entrepreneur Arun Goyal, founder of New Era Exports, remembers a time when finding overseas buyers meant writing letters, visiting embassies for catalogues and chasing leads through buying houses. His first export order in 2003 was worth barely $300.
After New Era Exports joined IndiaMART, global access suddenly became dramatically easier. A simple online listing connected the company with buyers across the US, UK and Australia without expensive overseas travel. Over time, the business expanded from handmade paper products into jewellery, leather goods and several other verticals.
For Goyal, IndiaMART proved that even modest Indian exporters could access global markets through digital discovery. Yet IndiaMART’s ambitions today extend far beyond B2B discovery.
Strategic push
Over the last several years, IndiaMART has aggressively expanded into accounting software, SaaS, logistics, fintech, inventory management and business automation. Subsidiaries such as Busy Infotech and Livekeeping Technologies represent a deeper strategic push into daily SME operations.
Busy Infotech itself has emerged as a significant growth engine. In FY26, Busy reported revenue of R119 crore alongside sharp EBITDA expansion. IndiaMART has also invested across logistics tracking, procurement platforms, warehouse management and invoice financing.
“The idea is to move from business discovery to business enablement,” says Gulati. “SMEs today need far more than visibility. They need accounting, compliance, logistics, payments and workflow automation.”
Technology remains central to that vision. Long before artificial intelligence became fashionable, IndiaMART had already invested heavily in behavioural matchmaking, multilingual search, cloud telephony and conversational commerce. Today, the company is positioning itself as AI-first. Its AI systems now process lakhs of multilingual and misspelt searches every month. The platform uses AI to improve supplier-buyer matchmaking, enrich catalogues, automate CRM responses, analyse buyer intent and detect fraud.
One of its most ambitious initiatives is IM VANI, a voice-based AI assistant that reportedly handles more than one lakh buyer calls daily. The company believes India’s fragmented SME economy is particularly suited to AI-led commerce tools because of language complexity, information asymmetry and trust deficits.
“India’s B2B ecosystem is incredibly fragmented,” says Gulati. “AI helps bridge information gaps and improves transaction efficiency in ways that were not possible earlier.”
Competition, however, is intensifying rapidly, with players such as Moglix and horizontal discovery platforms like Justdial and Trade India operating within the same audience segment.
Yet IndiaMART believes its biggest advantage lies in understanding Indian SME behaviour at scale and the network effects it has created. “This scale creates an organic traffic engine for us. Almost all RFQs are organic and SEO-led, thus making us a capital-efficient lead-generation platform,” says Gulati. “Indian business behaviour has deep regional, linguistic and category complexities. Understanding those nuances becomes a significant moat,” he adds. That moat has been built over decades through behavioural data, supplier relationships and transaction patterns.
The company’s integration into India’s SME ecosystem became especially visible during the pandemic years. When Covid disrupted supply chains and physical commerce, IndiaMART quickly shifted operations online and helped businesses pivot into high-demand sectors such as masks, sanitisers and medical supplies.
The pandemic also accelerated digital adoption among SMEs. Businesses that once treated online discovery as optional suddenly viewed digital visibility as essential for survival. IndiaMART helped fabric manufacturers produce and sell face masks and gloves, and trained sellers involved in chemical manufacturing to produce various disinfectants and sanitisers, going a step further beyond business discovery.
Democratising opportunity
IndiaMART’s larger story is not merely about technology or balance sheets. It is equally about democratising opportunity. Many SMEs that today run multi-crore businesses credit IndiaMART with helping them scale from obscurity to national visibility. The same transformation played out across smaller industrial businesses.
Kamruddin, founder of Servokon Systems, remembers starting operations in 1990 from a tiny 10x10 workspace with no business background and limited financial resources. In the pre-internet era, finding customers meant physically visiting markets and shops, often without meaningful responses.
Around 2000, Servokon made a modest investment in an IndiaMART listing – a move Kamruddin now describes as transformational. Enquiries began arriving from across India, opening entirely new markets for the company. Over the years, IndiaMART evolved from being just a lead-generation platform into a long-term branding, marketing and business-expansion partner for Servokon’s growth journey. Those stories matter deeply to the leadership because they align with the company’s larger philosophy.
India’s MSMEs contribute nearly 30 per cent of the country’s GDP, yet millions remain technologically under-equipped and financially underserved.
Agarwal believes IndiaMART’s long-term role lies in bridging that gap by making business access easier – access to markets, technology, buyers, finance and information.
“India still has millions of businesses that remain under-digitised,” he says. “If we can simplify business for even a fraction of them, the opportunity ahead remains enormous.” Even today, despite IndiaMART’s scale, Agarwal sees enormous untapped potential. Of India’s approximately 1.6 crore GST-registered businesses, only a fraction are deeply digitised.
The next phase of growth may therefore come not from metros, but from deeper penetration into India’s unorganised business economy. Personally, Agarwal remains intensely curious about technology and human behaviour. The rise of generative AI has strong potential to help understand consumers, businesses and markets more intelligently.
IndiaMART was not built for valuation headlines or quick exits. It was built patiently through the dotcom collapse, 9/11, demonetisation, GST disruptions, the pandemic and now the AI transition, with a clear goal in mind – to make doing business easier and democratise business opportunities for all.
Three decades later, India’s small businesses are finally becoming digital at scale. And IndiaMART, the platform born in a modest Patparganj house during the infancy of the Indian internet, now sits at the centre of that transformation.