Neeru Sharma created the first Indian e-commerce site, Infibeam that went public. It is among the very few profitable e-commerce ventures in India. The tag line of her e-tailing website is ‘Shop with a smile’. The way she talks, she spreads passion and positivity. She is the director of platform business service at Infibeam which is India’s first online retailer to go public and one of the many few start-ups that is profitable.
Neeru Sharma is from a middle class family in New Delhi. Her father’s profession was HR. He wanted to become an entrepreneur but he faced losses. Thus he had to go back to work and her mother looked after their small auto lamps plant.
In 1997, Neeru joined Maharshi Dayanand University in Rohtak to pursue computer science and engineering. She graduated in the year 2001. She managed to get a job in an IT sector company, TCS. She worked there for over two year before moving to Alcatel. At Alcatel she came across a lot of business related ideas. There a popular reality show introduced tele-voting for the first time in Indian television. Sharma being the product manager got to interact with the show’s marketing team.
She got married in 2005 and thought of starting a business with her husband. But they decided to go for an MBA first. They did their MBA in finance and stratergy from Carnegie Mellon University. Sharma worked with Jeff Bexos in Amazon. There she met Vishal Mehta who is one of the CEO at Infibeam. Their team’s job was to evaluate the e-commerce market in India.
Mehta returned to India in 2007 and Sharma started Infibeam in 2009. She initially operated from a small apartment office in Daryaganj, New Delhi. She would go from vendor to vendor and publisher to publisher pitching Infibeam and explaining them the useful aspect of it. She then had to educate people across the supply chain of e-commerce.
Infibeam started with books and then moved on to electronics and other categories. They created a B2B platform which enabled brands to have an online presence. Airtel was their first telecom partner. They also had clients for selling travel and tickets online. Soon after they partnered with Sony.
They spread their venture internationally too. They opened offices in Dubai and received clients across the world. Some of their clients are Amul and GeM (Government e-market), Orient Electric, Panasonic, Spykar, Sony, Daikin, Saudi Telecom Company and GVK Mumbai Airport. They also launched Pi which is the first Indian e-book reader.
Infibeam has around 1000 employees right now and it is doing great. Sharma believes in delivering the best for her customers and she will continue to do so.