Dinesh Agarwal is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of IndiaMART, the country’s largest online marketplace connecting Indian suppliers with domestic and international buyers.
Dinesh has played a crucial role in transforming the business ecosystem in India over the last two decades by helping millions of micro and small enterprises come online. Widely recognized for his vision and sustainable business ideas, he is one of the few ‘dot.com’ era survivors who have built a niche positioning for his business. He has successfully steered IndiaMART to survive the catastrophic 9/11 incident in 2001 that resulted in a 40% drop in business and the economic slowdown in 2008. His brainchild ‘IndiaMART’, with the aim of bringing in ‘ease of doing business’ in the country, has constantly brought in substantial innovation and digital transformation for enterprises. Today ‘IndiaMART’ is a flourishing business which serves more than 100 million registered users from across the country. In June 2019, IndiaMART got successfully listed on the BSE and NSE with its Initial Public Offer (IPO) which was very well received by the market.
The company has now evolved into a complete ecosystem of business solutions with features like CRM to manage leads and payment gateway to accept online payments. Today, even larger companies are getting attracted to advertise and generate leads on the platform of IndiaMART.
Dinesh has contributed tremendously to the Indian business environs and has been recognized by various media houses and industry associations as a vocal champion rooting for the cause of Indian SMEs. He has been recognized by CNBC as a Young Turk, and as The Market Maker by The Economic Times. There are several initiatives undertaken by him to promote technology in the Indian SME space. Agarwal represented the success story of India and its e-commerce on Trade and Development of eCommerce week at the United Nations Conference, of 2018 in Geneva.
Dinesh mentors SMEs, startups & individual entrepreneurs and actively abets them to successfully enhance businesses and deliver. He has invested in over 45 different firms so far in different sectors, including health tech and cloud telephony too.
Born in a business family, Dinesh completed his high school and education from his home state of Uttar Pradesh. He worked with several firms in India before moving to the US to join HCL Technologies. He quit his job at HCL in 1995 and moved back to India to pursue his entrepreneurial journey with ‘IndiaMART’.