FloBiz raises $31 million to scale its neobank for small companies in India – TechCrunch

FloBiz, an Indian startup that’s constructing a neobank for small- and medium-sized companies within the South Asian market, mentioned on Monday it has raised $31 million in a brand new financing spherical as it really works to broaden its product choices.

Sequoia Capital India and Assume Investments co-led the 18-month-old startup’s Collection B financing spherical. Present traders Elevation Capital and Beenext additionally participated within the spherical, which brings FloBiz‘s all-time elevate to over $41 million.

The startup’s marquee providing — known as myBillBook — helps small- and medium-sized companies digitize their invoicing, streamline enterprise accounting, and automate workflows of their enterprises.

India, the world’s second largest web market, is house to hundreds of thousands of small- and medium-sized companies. Scores of startups have launched neobanks within the nation in recent times to deal with serve millennials or companies.

“SME-focussed neobanks are constructing engagement with business- purchasers via their capacity to offer options like automated invoicing, collections/funds, accounting, stock and gross sales administration, taxes and in some instances curiosity on present deposits as nicely (banks can’t pay curiosity). This may occasionally assist to ramp- up and upfront their monetisation prospects,” analysts at Jefferies wrote in a report back to purchasers final week.

myBillBook, which helps Hindi, Gujarati and Tamil in addition to English, will add help for “a minimum of” 5 extra regional languages inside the subsequent six months, the startup mentioned, including that the app has been downloaded over 5 million instances.

“The product will even see deeper use of applied sciences like AI & picture processing to make the onboarding course of for the much less tech-savvy SMB house owners in tier 2 and tier 3 cities of India a pleasant first step to digital accounting,” the startup mentioned.

Scores of high-profile entrepreneurs — together with Vijay Shekhar Sharma of Paytm, Kunal Shah of CRED, Jiten Gupta of Jupiter, Amrish Rau of Pine Labs, Krishnan Menon of BukuKas, and Nitin Gupta of Uni Playing cards — have additionally backed FloBiz within the new financing spherical.

“Small companies are the actual heroes of our economic system. So as to energy the SMB economic system with expertise, one wants deep understanding, intuition and empathy for this viewers,” mentioned Tejeshwi Sharma, Managing Director of Sequoia Capital India, in an announcement.

“We’re actually impressed by the consumer centricity, product focus and experimentative method of the FloBiz founders. There’s virtually an ideal founder market match. The crew is stoked to associate with FloBiz on their mission of constructing a neobank for the rising SMBs of India.”

Rahul Raj, co-founder and chief govt of FloBiz, mentioned the startup will deploy the recent capital to “speed up tasks which have been within the works up until now – constructing personalisable modules & options into myBillBook, diversifying core product choices and getting ready to roll out monetary companies. We have now a slew of developments within the pipeline to additional delight our SMB companions within the subsequent 12 months.”