FloBiz has become the latest name in a long line to reign in capital from investors this year after the 18-month-old start-up raised $31 million in its latest Series B funding round led by Sequoia Capital India, Think Investments, and existing investors Elevation Capital and Beenext. With this, the start-up has raised over $41 million to date (including the $10 million it had raised this March).
Other participants in the funding round included angel investors such as Vijay Shekhar Sharma (Paytm CEO), Kunal Shah (CRED CEO), Jiten Gupta (Jupiter, founder, and CEO), Amrish Rau (Pine Labs CEO), Neeraj Arora (HalloApp CEO), Nitin Gupta (Uni Cards CEO), Ankit Tomar (Bizongo co-founder and CTO), Sayali Karanjkar (PaySense co-founder), and Krishnan Menon (BukuKas founder and CEO), along with 9Unicorns and Whiteboard Capital.
According to the Bengaluru-based start-up, the proceeds from the funding round would be utilized towards the expansion of its team, developing its product and scaling its distribution in order to serve more businesses. It also plans to increase its technical capabilities ahead of its foray into the financial services sector.
“We’re extremely thrilled to have Sequoia Capital India & Think Investments along with such a stellar set of angels back us on our mission. This raise will help us accelerate projects which have been in the works up till now – building personalizable modules & features into myBillBook, diversifying core product offerings, and preparing to roll out financial services. We have a slew of developments in the pipeline to further delight our SMB partners in the next 12 months,” said Rahul Raj, co-founder, and CEO of FloBiz.
FloBiz, a neobank, helps Indian SMBs (small and medium-sized businesses) grow by digitizing their invoicing, streamlining business accounting, and automating workflows via its flagship product, myBillBook. Launched in January 2020, myBillBook helps businesses maintain inventory, manage receivables & payables, and gain access to important business reports in order to make decisions more efficiently. This is something that India sorely needs, since much of the bookkeeping and accounting process continues to be offline and done by hand.
The popularity of myBillBook has highlighted the need for such technology, and with claimed userbase of over a million monthly active users and over 5 million downloads across the country, myBillBook processes over $1 billion worth of transactions conducted by SMBs on its platform every month.
“SMBs form a large part of our economy and our daily lives. Everyone in the FloBiz team is driven by a deep passion to create an impact by powering growth of the small & medium businesses around us. It has translated into our thoughtful product development process and widespread customer obsession across the organization,” added Raj.
Flobiz’s mybillbook currently supports English, Hindi, Tamil, Gujarati, and plans to add support for “at least” five more regional languages within the next six months. FloBiz expects that it would be seeing “deeper use of technologies like AI & image processing to make the onboarding process for the less tech-savvy SMB owners in tier 2 and tier 3 cities of India a delightful first step to digital accounting.”
Flobiz’s fundraise wouldn’t really come as as surprise. In a post-COVID world where going digital has only become a necessity, small business owners have rapidly realised the need to digitise their businesses, if they were to survive the economic onslaught brought in by COVID-19. So don’t be taken aback if you see more bets being placed on fintech looking to take SMBs digital. This is perhaps, just the beginning.
