Seventy-three times, investors looked at Asish Mohapatra's plan and said no.
They were not rejecting an app or a fad. They were doubting the thing at the heart of the business: selling steel, polymers and other raw materials to small manufacturers on credit, and being paid later. Most venture capitalists, as the account of his fundraising goes, simply did not believe that model could make money.
Most venture capitalists, as the account of his fundraising goes, simply did not believe that model could make money.
Mohapatra came from Odisha, then still spelled Orissa on the map, and got into IIT Kharagpur without any coaching. He went on to McKinsey and then into venture capital, a path that should have made him unusually good at pitching. In August 2015 he walked away from both to start OfBusiness. He did not begin with a theory of the market. He began, by his own telling in profiles, by sitting with balance sheets every day and learning how small manufacturers really worked.
What he found was uncomfortable. Around 95 per cent of the transactions on his platform ran on credit, and he did not own the credit. That was the flaw in the model, and it was why the sceptics were right about the version they had seen.
The turn came in December 2016, when a round of about ₹70 crore led by Zodius Capital let him build lending inside the company instead of renting it from others. The rejections, in hindsight, had pointed at the exact piece he had to build himself. By 2018 revenue touched ₹100 crore, and the company added tools like BidAssist and ProcureAssist to keep small buyers inside its ecosystem.
Then the numbers went vertical. In August 2021, with Tiger Global leading a round of about ₹1,300 crore, OfBusiness became a unicorn, serving some seven lakh small businesses.
It has not been smooth since. The IPO that was pencilled in for 2025 has slipped, and co-founder Nitin Jain left in December 2025 to start something new. The company has converted itself into a public company and is preparing a listing of $750 million to $1 billion, but the timeline has been deferred.
The business, meanwhile, keeps earning. In FY26 it reported revenue of ₹20,645 crore and a net profit of ₹724 crore, up from ₹597 crore a year earlier, with its lending arm Oxyzo earning ₹375 crore.
The lesson is hiding in those 73 noes. A rejection is not always a verdict on your idea. Sometimes it is a precise list of the part you have not built yet.