The Moglix Story: How Rahul Garg Left Google to Rebuild India's Industrial Backbone
How a former Google executive with 16 patents transformed India's $200 billion B2B commerce opportunity by choosing the hardest problems to solve
The resignation email sat in Rahul Garg's drafts folder for weeks in the summer of 2014. After five years building Google's advertising empire across Asia, growing the programmatic advertising business from zero to over $100 million, the 34-year-old engineer was about to make a decision that would puzzle his Silicon Valley peers. He was walking away from a seven-figure salary at one of the world's most coveted companies to digitize something decidedly unglamorous: India's industrial supply chains.
The conversation with his Google boss would prove pivotal to Moglix's eventual success. In an act of unusual corporate generosity, his manager offered him a unique arrangement: keep working on his startup idea while technically still employed, with only one condition, he couldn't join another company.
"My boss told me like there is only one rule for me accepting your resignation. You cannot join any other company... you know all the tracks, you know how to get things done, you keep working at it and whenever you want to sort of call it the day, I think that's fine."
This safety net would give Garg six months to validate his thesis about India's industrial transformation while maintaining financial stability, a luxury that would prove crucial in the capital-intensive world of B2B commerce.
Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.
The Anatomy of a Trillion-Dollar Problem
Garg's contrarian bet was rooted in a fundamental insight about the evolution of digital platforms. While most entrepreneurs chased consumer internet opportunities, he saw a structural shift happening in business-to-business commerce that few others recognized.
"My own view of the world was that everything in the world will move away from discovery to transaction platforms, and that is bound to happen for B2B what has happened for B2C."
The numbers supported his thesis. India's B2B e-commerce market, valued at just $5.6 billion in 2021, was projected to explode to $60 billion by 2025, a 10x growth trajectory that dwarfed most consumer internet segments. Yet the market remained fragmented, with players like IndiaMART dominating the "discovery" layer while transaction platforms remained virtually non-existent.
India's Business-to-Business (B2B) online marketplace represents a $200 billion opportunity by FY30, driven by the country's ambition to become a $5 trillion economy where manufacturing plays a central role. But in 2015, when Garg was formulating his strategy, this massive opportunity was largely invisible to venture capitalists who were busy funding the latest food delivery and ride-hailing startups.
Garg's approach was different. He wasn't interested in easy problems.
"I'm more inspired or excited about large problems which are difficult to solve, because I don't think the world has too many large problems which are easy to solve. Large problems which are slightly more difficult to solve is something that excites me."
The Wireless Years: Building Technical Credibility
To understand Garg's confidence in tackling such a complex challenge, you need to trace his technical journey back to 2001. Fresh out of IIT Kanpur with a degree in Electrical Engineering, he joined Ittiam Systems in Bangalore, diving deep into the world of wireless communication technologies that were reshaping global connectivity.
Over the next eight years, spanning roles at Ittiam, Freescale (formerly Motorola), and Conexant Systems, Garg accumulated an impressive portfolio of innovations. He worked on 4G cell phone chipsets, DSL broadband technologies, and wireless LAN systems, the invisible infrastructure powering the digital revolution.
"70% of the broadband DSL routers were powered by Conexant chipsets. In your house, whether it is the DSL line bringing the broadband to your home or whether you are watching a satellite receiver or whether you are looking at wireless LAN, all of those technologies I had an opportunity to dabble with."
By age 30, Garg held 16 US patents in signal processing and systems design, with many more in the approval pipeline. He had reached what he called "reasonable heights" in wireless communication design in India, with multiple opportunities to relocate to the US and Japan. But something deeper was driving him.
"That sort of love of engineering and I would say somewhere that very strong connect to the country that I want to do it from India remained with me, which continued to make me stay in India."
This wasn't just patriotism, it was strategic positioning. Garg understood that India's manufacturing sector, contributing significantly to the country's GDP, was ripe for technological disruption, and he wanted to be at the center of that transformation.
The Google Education: Mastering the "Black Box"
The transition to Google in 2010, following an MBA from Indian School of Business, was Garg's deliberate attempt to understand what he called "the black box" of sales and marketing. His first startup attempt in the wireless defense sector had failed partly because, as he put it:
"We didn't understand this black box of what does the sales and marketing mean. For me I felt I understood the innovation side, building products, but I said I want to figure out what is this chadia [challenge] of sales and marketing."
At Google Asia, Garg found himself at the epicenter of digital advertising's expansion across emerging markets. As Head of AdX (Advertising Exchange) for India, Southeast Asia, and Korea, he was building the infrastructure that would allow businesses to programmatically buy and sell digital advertising inventory.
The scale was immense. From 2010 to 2015, he helped grow Google's advertising business across the region to multi-billion-dollar annual revenues, working with a salesforce of over 100 people catering to large advertisers and agencies. The experience taught him how to scale technology platforms, manage complex B2B relationships, and navigate the regulatory challenges of operating across multiple countries.
But perhaps most importantly, it gave him insights into a failed experiment that would later inform Moglix's strategy. Google had launched "Google for Business" in 2013, attempting to create a B2B marketplace where businesses could search for suppliers instead of going to platforms like Alibaba.
"In the Google DNA, it wasn't a fulfillment platform, it was like the search and classifieds platform where people could go and search instead of going to Alibaba... one of those half-hearted attempts."
The failure taught Garg a crucial lesson: discovery platforms and transaction platforms required fundamentally different approaches, and success in one didn't guarantee success in the other.
The Ratan Tata Moment: Validation from a Legend
In late 2015, just months after registering Moglix in Singapore, Garg received an opportunity that would validate his entire thesis. He was invited to present to Ratan Tata, the legendary industrialist whose Tata Group had built much of India's industrial infrastructure over the previous century.
The 45-minute meeting would become one of Garg's most treasured memories, not just for the investment it secured, but for the character insights it provided.
"Meeting him was very interesting because you kind of are getting the goosebumps, but you also meet a person who is extremely humble and sort of listening to you. He's not like the typical savvy Google CXOs who have alpha energy of interrupting you or sort of overpowering the conversation. He's patiently listening to what you're trying to do."
The investment decision came within days, and while Tata is famously a man of few words, Garg understood the strategic alignment:
"His love for technology, his love for manufacturing were definitely something that I felt... we were taking all the bets anyway that he, if there is one startup we should invest, it should be us because we were having the two things he loved the most. There were not that many people who had both technology and manufacturing in the single sentence."
This wasn't just financial validation, it was strategic confirmation from someone who had spent decades building India's industrial ecosystem that Garg's thesis was sound.
The GST Revolution: When Policy Catalyzes Growth
While Garg was building Moglix's initial platform and supply network, a massive policy change was brewing that would fundamentally transform his addressable market. India's Goods and Services Tax (GST), implemented in July 2017, would eliminate the complex web of state-level taxes that had fragmented the country's commerce for decades.
For B2B commerce, GST was transformational. Before its implementation, Moglix had to navigate different tax regimes in each state, creating operational complexity that limited scalability.
"Pre-GST, dealing with large enterprises, we had to do excise, VAT, and all of that was happening by state. It was a nightmare to kind of do it in that manner because for every state you have to kind of go and knock on the state doors, and they each one of them will have different policies."
The impact on Moglix's growth was immediate and dramatic:
"GST completely transformed both our ability to build national B2B supply chain and our ability to kind of scale rapidly. We took our first 100 cr run rate almost like two years plus to get there, and the next one happened in six months."
This acceleration helped propel Moglix to unicorn status in May 2021, when it raised $120 million in Series E funding led by Falcon Edge Capital and Harvard Management Company, achieving a $1 billion valuation. The company had gone from a PowerPoint presentation to a billion-dollar valuation in just six years.
The Unit Economics of Hard Problems
By 2024, Moglix had reached annual revenues of $591 million (Rs 4,964 crore), establishing itself as one of India's largest B2B commerce platforms. But the journey to these numbers revealed the fundamental differences between B2B and B2C commerce that many investors and entrepreneurs still fail to grasp.
Unlike consumer e-commerce, where discounting can drive demand, B2B commerce operates on entirely different principles:
"I'm not going to buy for my factory more fasteners because they are cheaper right. I could buy maybe more clothes because they are cheaper. So discounting doesn't win the consumption; it can win the customer, but it doesn't win the consumption."
This insight shaped Moglix's entire approach to growth and profitability. While consumer startups engaged in cash-burning customer acquisition battles, Moglix focused on building sustainable unit economics from the beginning. In FY24, despite revenue growth slowing to 5.5% (from the previous year's 82.6%), the company managed to reduce losses by 16% to $22.5 million.
The business model itself reflected these realities. 98.98% of Moglix's operating revenue came from the sale of traded goods, with the remainder from commissions, IT services, and factoring. The company operated with procurement costs accounting for 84% of total expenditure, a reflection of its asset-light marketplace model that connected suppliers with buyers rather than holding inventory.
By 2022, Moglix's supply chain network included over 16,000 suppliers, with over 700,000 SKUs on its marketplace, supported by a network of over 40 warehouses. The platform served over 500,000 SMEs and over 1,000 large manufacturers across India and the UAE.
The Philosophy of Difficult Problems
What sets Garg apart from many technology entrepreneurs is his contrarian view on market dynamics and competition. While Silicon Valley preaches the virtues of "winner-takes-all" markets and monopolistic outcomes, Garg believes India's cultural and economic context requires a different approach.
"Many of the Western models work on this principle of race to monopoly by discounting and market share and then basically jack up the prices. Amazon basically drove many of its competitors out, including diapers.com and few other companies, purely by discounting and creating a monopoly and then jacking up prices."
But India, in Garg's analysis, is fundamentally different:
"India I think fundamentally we hate monopolies. While we are... US is more capitalist than democracy, probably India is more democracy than capitalists. We hate typically people who are pure capitalists. So I think we will struggle as a market if it was a one-player game as consumers."
This philosophy influenced Moglix's strategy of sustainable growth over winner-takes-all market capture. Instead of burning capital to eliminate competitors, the company focused on building operational excellence and customer value that could sustain long-term competitive advantages.
The Supply Chain Finance Revolution
One of Moglix's most significant innovations came through its recognition that transaction platforms could unlock financial services opportunities. In February 2021, the company launched Credlix, its supply chain financing platform, designed to offer collateral-free working capital solutions for more than 15,000+ suppliers.
The impact was immediate. Credlix quickly exceeded an annual run rate of $100 million in credit disbursals, financing over 26,000 invoices for 2,500+ MSMEs across 120 cities. This wasn't just a revenue diversification play, it was a strategic moat that deepened Moglix's relationships with both suppliers and buyers while addressing one of the most critical pain points in Indian manufacturing: cash flow.
In September 2024, Moglix invested $50 million in Credlix, signaling the company's commitment to building a comprehensive financial services platform around its core commerce business.
Global Expansion and the Cross-Border Opportunity
Moglix recently launched operations in the Middle East, part of a broader strategy to capitalize on cross-border B2B commerce opportunities. According to PayPal research, cross-border B2B ecommerce in India is expected to grow at a 28% CAGR from 2021 to 2026, reaching $54 billion.
The strategy is bidirectional: helping Indian manufacturers access global markets while bringing international products to Indian buyers. This approach leverages India's position as both a major manufacturing hub and a large consumer market.
"It's never a one-way street. It's a combination of both because if there are products which are not being available in India and you need to buy from other countries and bring it to India, we would do that. But then, yes, we are definitely continuing to expand our horizon of selling Indian products in other parts of the world as well."
The Path to IPO and "Desh Wapsi"
Garg has indicated that Moglix plans to list on Indian stock exchanges by 2027, part of a broader trend of Indian startups moving their domicile back to India ahead of public offerings. In 2024, 13 new-age tech companies raised over Rs 29,000 crores via IPOs on Indian exchanges, creating a favorable environment for technology companies seeking public market access.
The move reflects both practical considerations, access to a larger pool of domestic investors familiar with Indian market dynamics, and symbolic significance as Indian unicorns choose to list in their home market rather than seeking US or Singapore listings.
The $100 Billion Impact Vision
As Moglix approaches its tenth anniversary in 2025, Garg's ambitions have only expanded. The company's stated mission is to "make $100B impact on Indian economy by 2030", a goal that extends far beyond revenue targets to encompass the broader transformation of Indian manufacturing.
With a current valuation of $2.51 billion and over 4,166 employees, Moglix has established itself as the dominant player in India's B2B industrial commerce market. But Garg's ultimate vision extends beyond commerce to encompass manufacturing-as-a-service, supply chain optimization, and the digitization of India's industrial ecosystem.
The journey from 16 patents in wireless communication to building India's industrial commerce infrastructure represents more than just an entrepreneurial success story. It's a blueprint for how technical excellence, strategic patience, and contrarian thinking can combine to address the most fundamental challenges facing emerging economies.
"Creating an enterprise is about creating the size of impact. Given it's the largest sector in the country, even a 1% impact on the sector can be phenomenal for the country."
In a startup ecosystem often criticized for solving first-world problems with third-world labor, Garg chose the opposite path: using first-world technology to solve third-world infrastructure challenges. The result is a company that has not just achieved unicorn status, but has fundamentally changed how India's manufacturing sector operates.
As India continues its transformation into a global manufacturing hub, the success of platforms like Moglix becomes increasingly critical. They represent the digital infrastructure layer that will determine whether India can compete effectively in global supply chains while maintaining the economic benefits of manufacturing at home.
The engineer who once designed the invisible wireless protocols powering our smartphones has now built the visible commerce protocols powering India's industrial future. It's a reminder that sometimes the most important innovations happen not in the glamorous world of consumer apps, but in the essential but unglamorous work of rebuilding industrial infrastructure for the digital age.
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