Sequoia Capital-backed digital bookkeeping app, Khatabook has acquired a business management startup, Biz Analyst for $10 million in a mix of equity and cash as part of its ongoing efforts to monetize and grow.
Khatabook will absorb the entire team of Mumbai-based Biz Analyst and will see its employee base increase to 200 post-acquisition. Biz Analyst’s cofounders Vaibhav Vasa, Mehul Sutariya, Nilesh Zaveri will become part of Khatabook’s leadership team, the company said.
With this acquisition, Khatabook wants to give merchants, mainly the top 15% big retailers part of its 10 million monthly active merchant user base, the ability to digitize operations. It will also help its customers leverage business analytics, sales force automation, and digital invoicing by paying a premium for the value-added services.
In the past few months, Khatabook has been looking to monetise its services after posting losses of Rs 126 crore in 2019-20. Biz Analyst registered a revenue of Rs 4 crore in the same period and has 85,000 paid subscribers.
“Our vision at Khatabook is to bring the entire supply chain on one platform. We already have a fair bit of overlap with distributors, traders, and manufacturers. So basically it’s an effort to intensify our network effect,” said Ravish Naresh, co-founder & CEO, Khatabook.
Naresh said the focus will be on SaaS-led monetisation through its other suite of products and it will target larger merchants, distributors and retailers for these offerings. “Given our growth plans, we are not targeting profitability in the short term,” he added.
In the second half of the year, Khatabook plans to pilot supply chain financing and offer other financial products to its user base.
“We will be able to provide more value to all the distributors and all the retailers on the platform by basically enabling supply chain financing and cheaper credit for them because you know banks are so not able to qualify that for such loans,” Naresh said.
The two-year-old startup raised $60 million as part of its Series B led by Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin’s B Capital. Existing investors, including Sequoia India, Partners of DST Global, Tencent, and Unilever Ventures, and others also participated in the round. CRED’s Kunal Shah and Snapdeal co-founders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal have also invested in the startup.
The pandemic saw accelerated adoption of technology by micro, small and medium enterprises. Players like Tiger Global-backed OkCredit and Lightspeed-backed Dukaan are its competitor in the space.
Source: Economic Times