SUMMARY
The Series A round was led by Elevation Capital, with participation of existing investors
The startup offers an invoice management app ‘myBillBook’ for SMBs to manage payment, inventory
It added more than 3 Mn merchants on the platform in the last six months, representing 12% growth
Small and medium business (SMB) digitisation platform FloBiz has raised $10 Mn in a Series A funding round led by Elevation Capital. Existing investors Greenoaks Capital and BEENEXT also participated in the round.
FloBiz intends to use this funding for team expansion, product development and accelerate its sales and marketing efforts. The company has raised $23 Mn to date, with $10 Mn infused in Series A round and $3 Mn in seed round in 2019.
The company was founded in 2019 by IIT and BITS alumni Rahul Raj, Rakesh Yadav and Aditya Naik. It offers a cloud-based invoice management app ‘myBillBook’ for SMBs. The app, which was launched in early 2020, helps its clients with creating and sending invoices, expense tracking, customer management, payment management and more. Besides this, it also offers tools for tracking outstanding payments and stock management.
The app myBillBook can also integrate with WhatsApp to share invoices, purchase orders and business reports with other merchants, accountants and staff members. The app has been designed is currently available in four Indian languages Hindi, Gujarati and Tamil, including English.
FloBiz Plots 7X Growth Plan
CEO Raj stressed that myBillBook’s USP is in helping SMBs automate their workflows and this helps them manage inventory, receivables and payables in a more efficient manner. “FloBiz understands the diverse market and focuses on catering to businesses across the value chain. The solutions bring complete accounting capabilities on a mobile interface which can be used by any small business owner in their regional language,” the company said in its press note.
FloBiz claims to have added more than 3 Mn merchants on the platform in the last six months, representing a 12X growth in its user base. The company’s annualised transaction volume has also increased more than $6 Bn in the same time frame. The company believes that the latest funding would help it grow its trader base by 7x, as it plans to personalisation features to its app as per customer needs.
“Digitisation of SMBs is an irreversible trend and we have been very impressed with FloBiz’s mobile-first, bottom-up product led approach to capture this opportunity. We believe that myBillBook is building for foundational, deep use-cases for this segment making the product indispensable to the SMB owners,” Elevation Capital’s managing director Mridul Arora said.
Building For SMBs Is The Next Big Thing
There are approximately 63 Mn SMBs in India as per the official estimates from 2015-16. Out of these, 44 Mn or about 70% are unregistered, whereas the remaining 19.5 Mn are officially registered.
Several companies decided to tap into the opportunities in this segment as the country stepped into lockdown in 2020. Indian SMBs started taking their digitisation seriously and started opting in for solutions that would make inventory management, bookkeeping and digital transactions easier and efficient.
According to Cisco’s 2020 Asia Pacific SMB Digital Maturity Study, 69% of SMBs in the Asia-Pacific are accelerating their digitalization rates to address COVID-19 challenges. The report was based on the response of 1,500 respondents based in India, Indonesia, Japan and other countries based in Asia-Pacific region.
The report further ranked India on the ninth spot for its digital maturity, citing challenges like lack of talent and enabling technologies. It also mentioned that many SMDs “don’t know where to start” their digital transformation. The key priorities of the segment, when it comes to digitisation, are improved customer experience, operation or service delivery and finance viability and predictability.
