SMB Digitisation Platform FloBiz Raises $31 Mn Led by Sequoia, Others

SMB Digitisation Platform FloBiz Raises $31 Mn; Eyes Foray Into Financial Services

SUMMARY

Vijay Shekhar Sharma of Paytm and Kunal Shah of CRED join existing investors such as Sequoia Capital India, Think Investments in the funding round

FloBiz plans team expansion, product development and scaling distribution to serve more businesses

Prior to the latest fund raise, FloBiz had raised $10 million in Series A from Elevation Capital and existing investors in March this year

Fintech startup FloBiz, a neobank for the Indian small and medium businesses (SMB), has raised $31 Mn in a Series B funding round led by Sequoia Capital India, Think Investments and its existing investors Elevation Capital and Beenext.

The round also saw participation from Vijay Shekhar Sharma of Paytm, Kunal Shah of CRED, Jiten Gupta of Jupiter, Amrish Rau of Pine Labs. Neeraj Arora of HalloApp, Nitin Gupta of Uni Cards, Ankit Tomar of Bizongo, Sayali Karanjkar of PaySense and Krishnan Menon of BukuKas, along with 9Unicorns and Whiteboard Capital.

The startup plans to utilise the capital for team expansion, product development and scaling distribution to serve more businesses. FloBiz will also focus on building additional technical capabilities within the organisation, as it prepares to venture into financial services soon.

FloBiz’s flagship product myBillBook was launched in January 2020 with an aim to help SMB owners digitise invoicing, streamline business accounting and automate workflows of their enterprises.

It helps maintain inventory, manage receivables and payables, and access important business reports to enable efficient decision making. With over a million monthly active users, SMBs now record over $1 Bn worth of transactions on myBillBook every month, said the startup. It aims to launch the app in at least 5 more regional languages within the next 6 months.

Rahul Raj, co-founder and CEO of FloBiz, said he has a slew of developments in the pipeline for offering further services to its SMB partners in the next 12 months.

“We are really impressed by the user-centricity, product focus and experimentative approach of the FloBiz founders,” added Tejeshwi Sharma, Managing Director, Sequoia Capital India.

Prior to the latest fund raise, FloBiz had raised $10 million in Series A from Elevation Capital and existing investors in March 2021. Founded in 2019 by IIT and BITS alumni Rahul Raj, Rakesh Yadav and Aditya Naik, FloBiz is a neobank for SMBs backed by investors like Sequoia Capital, Elevation Capital, Greenoaks Capital, Beenext and Think Investments.

There are approximately 63 Mn SMBs in India as per the official estimates. Out of these, 44 Mn or about 70% are unregistered, whereas the remaining 19.5 Mn are officially registered.

According to Cisco’s 2020 Asia Pacific SMB Digital Maturity Study, 69% of SMBs in the Asia-Pacific were accelerating their digitalisation rates to address COVID-19 challenges.