74 rejections but country's first unicorn couple didn't give up

Ruchi Kalra and Asish Mohapatra have, as they put it, three children. Khushi is a precocious six-year old, the centre of their world.

- Siddharth Tiwari & Sharad Kohli

The other two have grown up dizzyingly fast, making Ruchi and Asish the country’s first ‘unicorn couple’, with each of them owning a company valued over a billion dollars.

“Ofbusiness is as old as our daughter. So, we gave birth to two kids in 2016, and from there on, we had to raise both rightly and intelligently,” laughs Ruchi.

The success of Ofbusiness, and its younger sibling Oxyzo, didn’t happen overnight. Its dream run was preceded by a dogged trek with 74 rejections in their Series B funding pitch before the eventual breakthrough. And some good fortune — their B2B business models thrived in the entropy that the pandemic threw the corporate ecosystem into.

Asish, who now has his sights fixed on taking the company public through an IPO, remembers how a security guard once dismissed him as a pesky marketer. “Six years ago, when I went to a company to pitch our services to them, the guard did not let me in. This week, we are buying that company,” says Asish, unable to hide a chuckle.

But how did this $2-billion duo get together? Ruchi and Asish’s paths first crossed 15 years ago on the campus of the Indian School of Business (ISB) Hyderabad. “Ruchi won’t even remember this, but the first time I saw her was when I visited ISB as a recruiter for McKinsey,” recalls Asish of that day in 2007. Soon, they were working together for a real estate client. “That’s when we became deeply aware of each other’s personalities and professional abilities,” says Asish, 41. He and Ruchi married in 2009 and launched their company seven years later.