From setting up IIT Kharagpur’s first online food delivery business, Zaaika, in 2013-14, to launching the country’s first multi-currency exchange which supported peer-to-peer trading on an open order book format, Koinex in 2017, 28-year-old Rahul Raj has had an eye for opportunities in e-commerce space. While there were platforms taking stock of use cases like digital human resource management system, payroll management system and manufacturing management, Raj saw a more foundational opportunity, which led to the incubation of FloBiz in January 2020. FloBiz helps digitise small and medium businesses (SMBs). Its flagship product, My Bill Book, is a GST billing and accounting software, which aims to solve pain points of SMBs by helping them digitise day-to-day operations, create bills (GST & non-GST), keep track of sales, purchases, expenses and automate the inventory management system. The subscription plan of My Bill Book starts from `399/year to `14,999/year.
The company caters to GST-registered businesses operating in the annual turnover range of `60 lakh to `20 crore across manufacturing, distribution, wholesaling, retailing services and tech start-ups. My Bill Book is a widely used app, which has crossed over 6.5 million downloads. “We currently stand at more than 1 million monthly active businesses, says Raj. “They generate trade of more than $1.5 billion every month on the product.” With close to 1,00,000 reviews, the app enjoys a rating of 4.7 on the Google Play Store.
Backed by investors, including Sequoia Capital, Elevation Capital, Greenoaks Capital, Beenext and Think Investments, FloBiz has raised around $44 million in three rounds, including the $31-million Series B funding led by Sequoia Capital announced in September. Raj claims the business has already hit a run rate of a multi-million dollar in revenue. The company is looking at monetising tailored services for SMBs. In fact, ”the pilot project to distribute paid product was started last year on a small scale,” he adds. — Avneet Kaur