Mumbai: SMB digitisation startup FloBiz has raised $10 Mn in a Series A round led by Elevation Capital. The latest round saw participation from existing investors Greenoaks Capital and Beenext. FloBiz that offers a billing and accounting app myBillBook as its flagship product intends to use the capital for team expansion, product development and accelerate sales and marketing efforts.
Driven by multiple tailwinds such as mobile/data penetration, GST compliance, technology adoption and lately Covid-19, historically dispersed SMBs (small and medium businesses) in India are getting more organised and formalised. While technology advancement and digitisation push has led to several transformations in the sector, essential software like custom ERPs and legacy accounting systems still come at a very high cost, require considerable technical know-how and prior accounting knowledge. The absence of affordable and easy-to-use solutions hinder the growth of SMBs significantly. FloBiz’s mission is to unlock this access and accelerate the growth of Indian SMBs through digitisation; in this endeavour the company has re-designed the complete user experience and created a superior software product.
Talking about the latest round of funding, Rahul Raj, Founder and CEO, FloBiz said, “The MSME sector is the backbone to India’s GDP helping the country speed up to becoming a $5 trillion economy. Access to smartphones and internet penetration with affordable data plans have led to a rapidly growing demand for digital tools and products amongst small and medium business owners, who currently have to heavily rely on manual, paper-led processes. However, there lies a huge opportunity when it comes to providing end-to-end support and solutions to SMBs for managing their business seamlessly. We strongly believe that our product myBillBook empowers SMBs by automating their workflows, helps maintain inventory better, manage their receivables & payables and download critical business reports for quick and efficient decision making on the go. With this additional funding we plan to grow our trader base at least 7X by 2022 through deeply focused product developments driven by user feedback and making myBillBook simple to use through personalization.”
Commenting on the announcement, Mridul Arora, Managing Director, Elevation Capital said “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. We were very impressed with the customer love and the depth of usage of the product across the SMB value chain – retailers, distributors, wholesalers and manufacturers. The optionality opened by capturing deep users across the supply chain are enormous, and we look forward to partnering with the team as they execute on their extensive product road-map.”
The SMB sector in India is a broad, heterogeneous spectrum that includes small shops, large traders and regional manufacturers. The needs and pain points across the spectrum also vary significantly. For the micro segment, needs are largely limited to maintaining a ledger for debt calculation and accounting. However, for large businesses, use cases and needs are much more involved and deeper. FloBiz understands the diverse market and focuses on catering to businesses across the value chain. FloBiz’s flagship product myBillBook offers deep capabilities – recording several types of transactions (sales, purchases, expenses etc.), maintaining inventory, managing receivables & payables, building business reports (profit & loss, stock summary, sales summary etc.), providing multi-user access with permission controls and many more. The solutions bring complete accounting capabilities on a mobile interface which can be used by any small business owner in their regional language.
Prior to the $10 Mn Series A capital raise, FloBiz raised $3 Mn in its seed stage round in 2019. FloBiz is now a 60+ member team of talented individuals and has grown 12X in the last 6 months with 3M+ small and medium businesses on-boarded on the platform and $6B+ annualised transaction volume recorded. FloBiz’s flagship app myBillBook offers seamless WhatsApp integration which makes it possible to share invoices, POs, business reports etc. easily with other merchants, accountants and staff members. The app has been designed from a business owner’s perspective rather than an accountant’s, and is currently available in English, Hindi, Gujarati & Tamil.