by Ravish Naresh, CEO, and Co-founder, Khatabook
I am excited to announce we’ve closed a Series C funding round of $100 million with a valuation now close to $600 million. The round was led by US-based VC firms Tribe Capital and Moore Strategic Ventures (MSV). Other investors in this oversubscribed series C round were Alkeon Capital, with continued investment participation from internal investors B Capital Group, Sequoia Capital, Tencent, RTP Global, Unilever Ventures, and Better Capital. In addition, Balaji Srinivasan, Sriram Krishnan participated as independent investors among others in Khatabook’s series C funding round.
In the words of Arjun Sethi, Co-Founder and Partner at our lead investment firm Tribe Capital, “Khatabook has successfully built such a network by empowering this seismic shift among MSME businesses to move from paper to digital, literally.”
The Journey So Far:
In two and a half years, Khatabook has become an integral part of the MSME community in almost every district in India. For that, we are thankful to our merchant users on the Khatabook platform for changing their offline business practices to digital; Our users inspire us.
Currently, We have a monthly active user base of 10 Mn and growing. Other than our Flagship Khatabook, we have introduced 3 other solutions for MSMEs.
- Biz Analyst by Khatabook is a leading SaaS business management solution integrated with the Tally ERP9 to offer premium value-added on-demand services like sales and purchase reports, livestock updates, and other MIS reports, thus allowing a bird’s-eye view of the business operations.
- Pagarkhata by Khatabook is a staff management platform for businesses to help merchants digitize staff attendance, payroll/wages, attendance updates, leaves, payments, etc. We have also partnered with Workindia to help MSMEs with efficient hiring through the Pagarkhata platform.
- Cashbook is for those who want a digital solution for only cash handling and tracking. Cashbook helps with cash sales and expense management. While it is available as a feature within the Khatabook app, we have a full functionality exclusive Cashbook android app for those only looking for cash and expense management solutions.
What’s Next?
Now that we have built a widely accepted tech ecosystem for MSMEs across the country, we will focus on financial service disbursement through our tech platforms. The financial services on the Khatabook platform will digitally foster lending, payment, and deposits related efficiencies in the MSME space.
As we build financial services, we will be looking for the right partnership opportunities to enable the seamless rollout of solutions benefiting the economic aspirations of millions of small businesses.
Acknowledging Contributions of Our People
On this milestone, we are announcing a buyback of 10Mn USD worth of ESOPs to acknowledge and reward employees, ex-employees, and early investors who showed faith in the company’s mission and contributed to the company’s unprecedented growth. Eligible employees will be able to sell as much as 30% of their vested options. Khatabook has also expanded its ESOP pool to USD 50Mn.
And finally, we are strengthening our talent base. We will accelerate hiring, especially in engineering, product, design, analytics, and data science functions.