In 1996, Dinesh Agarwal returned to India after a few years working for HCL in the United States, having watched the early internet take shape and wanting to bring some version of it home. With his cousin Brijesh Agrawal, he started IndiaMART out of a flat in Delhi with roughly ₹40,000 in savings, an online directory meant to connect Indian exporters with buyers abroad, at a time when the country had well under 100,000 internet users.
There was no funding round behind it. For the first five years, the company gave away listings for free just to build a base of exporters worth showing to buyers, printing and faxing inquiries by hand before mailing them out the next day. It was slow, unglamorous, manual work, and it stayed that way for a long time.
Staying alive through every downturn that hit
IndiaMART's early years ran straight through some of the worst conditions a small internet company could face. The dot-com crash wiped out most of its peers around 2000, and the 9/11 attacks hit its export-driven customer base hard the following year. The company kept its team intact through both, staying profitable in years when "profitable" and "internet company" rarely appeared in the same sentence.
"I believe investments are made only after the cheques come in."
— Dinesh Agarwal, Founder & CEO, IndiaMART · Brainbuxa
The pivot that finally needed outside money
By 2007-08, the picture inside India had changed: domestic internet adoption was accelerating, mobile phones were spreading fast, and Agarwal could see that the export-only model had a ceiling. IndiaMART made a deliberate bet to go after India's own domestic B2B market instead, a much larger and more competitive opportunity than the export directory it had run for a decade.
That pivot is the one thing IndiaMART didn't fund entirely out of its own pocket. After more than a decade of staying self-funded from 1996 through 2008, the company took its first outside capital, led by Intel Capital, specifically to build out the sales and technology infrastructure the domestic push required. It was a strategic decision made from a position of strength, not a company running low on runway. IndiaMART would go on to raise a few further rounds over the next several years, including a 2016 round backed by Amadeus Capital, WestBridge Capital, Quona Capital and Intel Capital again, before listing publicly on the BSE and NSE in June 2019.
The result
IndiaMART is now India's largest online B2B marketplace, connecting suppliers with buyers in a business built on subscriptions and paid leads. For FY24, the company reported consolidated revenue of ₹1,196 crore (roughly $140 million) and a net income of ₹334 crore (roughly $40 million), as a publicly listed company headquartered in Noida.
What another founder can take from this
IndiaMART doesn't fit the "never raised a rupee" version of the bootstrap story, and it shouldn't be forced into one. What makes it worth studying is the order of operations: more than a decade of self-funded, profitable discipline first, survived through two separate downturns, and only then a single outside check, taken on the company's own terms, aimed at a specific pivot it had already decided to make. The capital didn't rescue the business. It followed a decision the business had already proven it could make without it.