Rahul Garg walked out of Google in January 2015 with a secure job behind him and, by his own account, something to prove. Moglix was not his first try. It was his third.
He had grown up in Faridabad, the first entrepreneur in his family, and studied electrical engineering at IIT Kanpur, graduating in 2001. After a stint as a product manager at a chip company, he did an MBA at the Indian School of Business and joined Google, where he ended up running its ad exchange across India, Southeast Asia and Korea. From the outside it looked like a straight, safe line.
Before Moglix he had started two companies that, as he has acknowledged in interviews, did not work out.
What almost nobody knew was how crooked the line had been underneath. Before Moglix he had started two companies that, as he has acknowledged in interviews, did not work out. Both had co-founders. Both ended without the outcome he wanted. So when he quit Google in his mid-30s, he was not a first-timer with beginner's luck. He was a man with a record of failing, going back in.
The idea came from watching consumer e-commerce work. If people could buy phones online, he reasoned, factories could buy bolts, bearings and safety gear the same way. Indian industrial purchasing was fragmented and slow. He wanted to be the Alibaba for it.
The money did not come easily. Between 2015 and 2019, investors were wary of B2B. Accel and Ratan Tata backed him in October 2015, and Tata's cheque, after they met in 2016, was what Garg later called a moment of victory. For a founder with two earlier misses, an endorsement like that carried weight no pitch deck could.
The company grew into industrial supply, financing through Credlix, and acquisitions in Singapore and India. A Series E of $120 million came in 2021 and a reported valuation of $2.6 billion in January 2022. Then the market turned. Moglix laid off about 40 people in 2023, around 3% of staff, and its FY22 numbers showed $307 million in revenue with losses widening to $22 million.
Today Moglix says it serves about 3,000 manufacturing plants across India, Singapore, the UK and the UAE (2023). It is still unlisted, and the profit question is still open.
The thing worth taking from Garg is not the unicorn tag. It is that he went into the third attempt carrying the first two, with experienced leaders around him and a clear thesis, rather than pretending they never happened. Failure, for him, was an input to the next company, not a line to be deleted from the story.