Indian accounting app Khatabook bags $25m in series A funding

India-based Khatabook, an accounting service provider for small and medium-sized enterprises in the country, has raised US$25 million in a series A funding round from a slew of high-profile investors, pushing its total investment raised to US$29 million.

Photo credit: Pixabay.

Firms such as GGV Capital, partners at DST Global, RTP Ventures, Sequoia India, Tencent, and Y Combinator participated in the round, alongside more than 20 angel investors including former PayU India CEO Amrish Rau, SoftBank Investment Advisers senior managing partner Deep Nishar, and Snapdeal CEO Kunal Bahl.

Through its mobile app, Khatabook helps SMEs record and review transactions with customers, acting as a digitized version of a traditional khata-bahi, or book of accounts in English.

The app also sends out notifications to customers every time a transaction is recorded against them and generates reports to aid businesses with decision-making.

Khatabook, which was founded just last year, is looking to launch other products catered to SMEs in the next few months, Livemint reported.

“At Khatabook, we have taken early but significant steps towards leveraging this trend to digitize India’s shopkeepers. For most of our merchants, we are the first business software they’ve used in their entire life. And we will continue to build more India-first innovations to further enable the growth of what is still a largely untapped sector,” said CEO and co-founder Ravish Naresh.

Currently, Khatabook has over 2.9 million active businesses and 5 million registered users on its platform, which supports 11 languages. It also has users in Nepal, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.

Khatabook is part of the first batch of startups participating in Surge, Sequoia India’s new startup accelerator. As part of the program, Surge has invested US$1.5 million in Khatabook, as well as the other 16 startups included in the program.