A New Yorker in Bangalore is helping India’s small businesses work better

Photo credit: Indrik myneur.

Right in front of my house is a store that sells exotic fishes and two that stitch clothing from fabric. Turn the corner and you’ll see dozens more, from grocery vendors to a used electronics store.

Known as small and medium businesses (SMBs), there are an estimated 30 million of them across India.

Some, like grocery stalls, sell to consumers (B2C), while others, like stores that sell printers and computers in bulk, target other businesses (B2B).

The latter power India’s infrastructure. If they don’t run well, other businesses don’t get what they need. If the grocery stall owner doesn’t get the right amount of produce shipped to him, his business will falter. Without that B2B fish food startup’s shipments, the exotic fish may die.

Hummingbill, a small startup based out of Bangalore, is working on eliminating one hiccup that those businesses face – timely payments. It’s a vicious cycle, co-founder Adam Walker explains. If money doesn’t come through on time, businesses don’t have the resources to pay the other businesses that they work with. That creates lots of problems.

His answer is a Gmail plugin that helps SMBs send and track payment invoices to other businesses.

Once the plugin has been enabled, a business owner can click a Hummingbill icon located on the upper left corner of a Gmail inbox. Then, they have to fill out details like product sold and due date, and the tech behind the plugin produces an invoice that can then be sent to a client.

It can also create aging reports – a writeup of invoices that are still unpaid – and can be customized so managers can track the deals their sales representatives have been closing.

If a business is already using a popular system to create invoices – like Tally or Zoho Invoices in India – it can pull data from it to use on Hummingbill. But as Adam explains, these other systems are heavy and treat invoice management as a side focus.

His belief is that invoices are worth more attention, especially in India where getting paid late is the norm. According to Adam, the average time between sending an invoice and getting money is 67 days – the worst in the Asia Pacific region.

That’s where Hummingbill is most impactful, he explains. “Our real motivation is figuring out why businesses get paid late,” he says. “We want to make it easier to keep track of their hundreds of unpaid invoices. If you fix the very beginning of the supply chain, you can have a positive effect on everyone.”

An easy alternative

While it focuses on small and medium businesses, the convenience has gotten companies of other sizes to use Hummingbill too. It currently has four major enterprise customers, including a security company with over 10,000 employees.

Another customer is a food distributor with over 800 restaurants, hotels, and hospitals as clients. “That was an interesting problem to solve,” says Adam. “When you have 800 customers transacting 5 times a month, that’s a ton of times to have to look at a bank statement. They also weren’t clearly marking out what invoices were for, which was making things complicated for them.”

Kill your darlings

Bangalore