SME-focused, Khatabook Raises USD 25 Million Funding from Affluent Investors

The arrival of the internet in India was like the unfolding of a miracle, affecting and transforming the life of Indians in a revolutionary way. Overnight, it seems, it delivered immense resources, as well as knowledge, to the masses. With its arrival, people began socialising, gained knowledge about different cultures, and crossed geographical boundaries on the virtual pathway to connect with loved ones.  

Interestingly, amid the increasing number of internet users, some entrepreneurs have resorted to using old ways of operating business. They record transactions and other monetary operations physically instead of digitizing the entire process. Addressing this issue, the Indian startup, Khatabook, has come up with digitized bookkeeping services and other additional monetary services for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). 

The Bengaluru-headquartered startup, Khatabook has recently raised USD 25 million in Series A funding round, as reported by Tech Crunch. The partners of DST Global, Sequoia India, GGV Capital, Y Combinator and Tencent are the investors who have funded Khatabook in this round. To date, the startup firm has raised USD 29 million in aggregate. 

Offering Ease in Bookkeeping 

In the fresh funding round of Khatabook, a large chunk of affluent angel investors, including Aditya Agarwal of Dropbox, Amrish Rau of PayU, James Viraldi of TikTok, Deep Nishar of SoftBank, Sriram Krishnan, Akshay Kothari of Notion, Anand Chandrasekharan who formerly worked at Facebook, Kunal Bahl of SnapDeal, Kunal Shah of CRED and Jitendra Gupta of LazyPay, have decided to help the startup expand its reach and operations, as stated in a media report. 

The startup administers an easy-to-use online application that helps SMEs to record monetary transactions and receive online payments. Khatabook claims to have over 2.9 million active businesses on its platforms and over 5 million registered merchants. The app is available in 11 languages and also has a presence in Nepal, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The Khatabook team plans to launch other products for micro, small and medium enterprises in the coming months, reported VC Circle, citing the company’s official statement.

The online application helps SMEs to digitally retain and track financial transactions. It offers its services in 11 languages to the users. Some of its features include sending payment reminders to the lessors via WhatsApp, as well as SMS, and creating reports which assist in recovering receivables. This application is essentially prepared keeping in mind small shopkeepers and grocery store owners. By using it, they operate their Khatabook account and track money that they need to receive from creditors digitally.  

This application was mainly created by Vaibhav Kalpe. In October 2018, the company was acquired by Kyte Technologies and later, Kalpe joined the company. Dhanesh Kumar, Ashish Sonone, Jaideep Poonia, and Ravish Naresh are the founders of Kyte Technologies. The company is presently amid 17 startup firms from the first group of Surge, Sequoia India’s rapid accelerator programme. The programme is essentially for primary-stage startups in India as well as Southeast Asia. Furthermore, Info Edge and Y Combinator are investors in the Kyte Technologies-led company.