For building a rural distribution business generating over rs. 19 Crore in annual revenue. Counts hcl founder ajai chaudhari and arun duggal as investors. Now diversifying into rural ecommerce through an “assisted sale” model of showing customers products before they buy.

DIVYA M. CHANDRAMOULI

Incorporated in March 2013, Inthree Access Services Pvt. Ltd. (Inthree) has moved from providing consultancy services in rural marketing to connecting agents and aggregators of customers to its portal, Boonbox.com; a platform that helps rural customers buy products which they may not have easy access to. Thus far, the company’s customer base has grown to 5,00,000 rural customers through the districts of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh and it has distributed over 7,00,000 units of durables. Since its foray in the rural distribution business, Inthree has made consistent profits with a gross merchandise value of Rs. 50 crore and today, it has diversified into rural e-commerce through an ‘assisted sale’ model. From an annual revenue of Rs. 7.19 crore in fiscal 2013-14, it has more than doubled this figure in fiscal 2014-15 to register an annual revenue of Rs. 19.2 crore.

In September 2014, the Indian Angel Network first invested Rs. 15 million in Inthree and the network invested a second sum of Rs. 10 million in February 2015. The company’s strength at present is 35 employees, but it plans to add exponentially to its team to take that number to over 1100 people, in a span of three years. Inthree’s vision for Boonbox is to add services in areas such as healthcare and education which will truly benefit the lives of rural India.

Inthree acquires rural customers at low cost, using the power of aggregators like NGOs who have a captive audience, and the trust in the enterprise is based on the credibility of its channel partners. 

To tide over the problems of poor Internet and credit card penetration, Inthree uses mobile apps as an e-Catalogue and order management system, through a cash in advance model. 

Boonbox delivers products to customer’s homes, redefining buying habits in rural areas, where travel to the nearest big city is the norm.