Here’s a fully homegrown startup with a highly localised product going great guns. The reference is to the business accounting app ‘Khatabook’, a simple app that helps small businesses keep track of their daily transactions. More importantly, through ‘Khatabook’, the trader or the businessman is able to keep track of receivables, send out reminders and collect the payments even, using the UPI platform.
Khatabook is in the news for having closed its Series A fundraising of $25 million. The investors in this round are a healthy mix of marquee VCs (venture capitalists) plus 20 angel investors. The venture capitalists are GGV Capital, partners of DST Global, RTP Ventures, Sequoia India, Tencent and Y Combinator apart from others. The list of 20 angel investors includes, Amrish Rau, Anand Chandrasekharan, Deep Nishar, Gokul Rajaram, Jitendra Gupta, Kunal Bahl, Kunal Shah and so on.
For a company that started its operations from December 2018, its performance has been phenomenal in the nine months till date. ‘Khatabook’ (‘khata’ in Hindi means account) boasts of 5 million merchants in India using its app, in addition to some users in the neighbouring countries of Nepal, Pakistan and Bangladesh. They expect to come up with a product suitable for MSMEs soon. Khatabook has seen transactions worth $3 billion on its platform in the month of August this year. The recovery figures quoted by users of this app is $5 billion in a span of 6 months. The app is being downloaded and used by merchants, traders and SMEs across a spectrum of business sectors, the main ones being kirana, mobile, hardware, garments, electronics, restaurants, pharmacies, agriculture, jewellery, furniture, automobile, photo studios, travel agents, and dairy shops.
For Sequoia Capital, this is the second investment in Khatabook as they had already invested at the early stage of the startup. ‘Khatabook‘ (the company’s name is Kyte Technologies Inc.) has so far raised $29 million including this Series A funding.
The startup’s business is growing at a scorching pace of 20% every week and more than 500 types of businesses are using the app currently. The company wants to connect 25 million Indian merchants within its app in the next 12 months. The Khatabook app is available in 11 languages which is a great help to the merchants who may not be so proficient in English.
It has to be placed on record that the Khatabook app was originally developed by a shopkeeper’s son in rural Maharashtra. It was made available on Google’s Play Store first in 2016. From there, Kyte Technologies acquired the ownership of the app by onboarding the original developer. Additional developments are now being done at the end of the new setup.