Khatabook, one of the more popular fintech companies in India to have steadily grown over the years, is announcing a fresh $60Mn fundraise. The digital book-keeping and ledger platform has primarily raised the money from Eduardo Saverin’s B Capital Group. This takes the total funding raised by the two year old firm to $87 million.
While official valuation numbers have not been disclosed, media reports suggest that Khatabook may have been valued anywhere between $275-$300 Million. Other investors in the round include existing institutional investors, including Sequoia Capital, and Partners of DST Global, Tencent, GGV Capital and RTP Global, along with a group of angel investors.
“Started with a vision of transforming India’s small shops, today we are the biggest player in the small business segment digitising a sector that forms the backbone of our economy. We are looking to work closely with the government and financial institutions to strengthen our market leadership and help MSMEs increase their income while making them more efficient and competitive,” Ravish Naresh, chief executive of Khatabook, said.
Khatabook’s fundraise comes at a crucial time. India’s merchants, mostly small mom and pop stores in the neighborhood, have never really been truly digital in their overall operations. And while there have been concerted efforts from a large section of startups to digitise that part of India’s retail chain, significant results are still awaited. But with coronavirus taking over the world economy and all sorts of physical transactions almost brought to a standstill, Khatabook has a chance to make a focused push into digitising these smaller merchants.
Khatabook currently claims to have over 100 million active merchants online, with over $180 billion worth of transactions recorded so far, thus making it the largest such player in this extremely lucrative sector. Data from AppAnnie suggests that Khatabook’s app has close to 910,000 daily active users, almost double of what Paytm’s merchant app has.
In terms of deploying this fresh capital, Khatabook will focus on expanding its product line-up and invest in tech to speed up that process. One such product that it could possibly look at, is lending. More recently, the company was among a few young fintech companies who had applied for a NBFC license in the country. NBFCs basically lend out to smaller businesses and an offline lending arm could sit quite well with Khatabook’s existing business model.
