2019 has turned out to be one of the best years for entrepreneurs and startups in India. The past ten months have churned as many as 10 Unicorns, and about 340 startups raised $7 billion approximately.
Besides usual growth and actions, the ecosystem has also seen the emergence of fresh genres such as video commerce and digital bookkeeping. Startups in both segments have garnered a heightened interest from top tier investors.
Particularly, two startups – Khatabook and OKCredit in the bookkeeping space together cornered over $100 million from the likes of Lightspeed, Sequoia Capital, Tiger Global and Tencent. On the back of large funding, they have been competing fiercely for more market share.
But, they have now to deal with a new and experienced competitor – Instamojo.
The Kalaari Capital-backed firm has introduced Instamojo Credit Book. It allows merchants to keep track of credit given to vendors, suppliers, and customers, monitor cash receivables, send payment reminders and maintain a centralised record of their cash flow.
In simple words, the feature enables merchants to get rid of the old ledger book, excel sheet, and calculator. Since Instamojo provides payment gateway and lending along with logistics and sourcing facilities for MSMEs, it certainly has an advantage over OKCredit and Khatabook.
According to Instamjo’s co-founder and CEO Sampad Swain, the bookkeeping feature will be rolled out to a million merchants. Unlike OKCredit and Khatabook, Instamojo Credit Book is one of the many features offered by the company.
In terms of scale, OKCredit claims to have 1.7 million monthly users and 50 million transactions, while Khatabook has about 10 million registered users across 2,500 cities. According to Entrackr sources, OKCredit has a burn of about Rs 5-6 crore every month.
On the other hand, Khatabook spends close to Rs 2-2.5 crore every month. While the duo has been splurging on marketing and promotion to drive installs and usages, Instamojo doesn’t require to do because of its existing user base.
With the introduction of bookkeeping feature, Instamojo becomes a more holistic solution for MSMEs. Moreover, many believe that digitising traditional khata-bahi can’t be a standalone product or app. According to them, it’s merely a feature. Going forward, it would be exciting to see how Instamojo Credit Book scales up and impact OKCredit and Khatabook.
