India has 64M SMBs. It can be tempting to paint this base with one broad brush. But behind this number sits a complex ecosystem - of thriving supply chains, heterogenous stakeholders, ambitious owners, and unique needs. India’s new-age small business owners face a strange dichotomy - elegant mobile-first products like WhatsApp, Facebook and Sharechat have become an integral part of their personal life, while being on top of their business requires battling paper documents, Excel file, and legacy accounting software - often all at once.

There’s aspiration to use software. But building for SMBs is non-trivial. It requires both: a simple, intuitive, mobile-first interface as well as a powerful platform that adapts equally to the requirements of a small shop, a large trader or a regional manufacturer. myBillBook, FloBiz’s flagship product, does just that.

myBillBook allows business-owners across the value chain to create customizable, professional, GST-compliant invoices on their mobile. Billing is the foundation for offering deep accounting capabilities and giving control back to the business owner - with no need for technical know-how and prior accounting knowledge. It enables access to automated inventory management, AR/AP control and business reporting.

The FloBiz team is uniquely positioned to solve this challenge. Rahul, Rakesh and Aditya met at Bizongo, a B2B sourcing company, where they understood Indian SMB supply chains firsthand. They then together founded Koinex, India’s largest digital assets exchange and tackled complexity at scale - Koinex recorded $265M in trading volume in a single day.

We had been closely tracking the team’s journey in building FloBiz, as they iterated through product and value propositions. Within a few months post the launch of myBillBook in early 2020, it was clear something special was being built. Business owners would discover the app, make a few entries about their counterparties and inventory, and come back week on week, making 80-100% of their invoices on the platform, almost wholly replacing pen and paper. myBillBook was becoming a sticky, habit-forming product.

We had long been excited about the digitization of SMBs through foundational use-cases that could capture the business’ core source of truth. We opened our Bangalore office for our first (socially-distanced) meeting post the lockdown. We initially budgeted 90 minutes for a deep dive with the team. That quickly extended to 150 minutes as we detailed what we wanted to cover. The team came over at 3:30PM on a Friday afternoon - by the time we wrapped up, it was well over five hours into the meeting!

Rahul, Rakesh and Aditya together bring a solid mix of deep product thinking, a close ear to the voice of the customer and a sharp focus on business outcomes. The result is a product that shows strong customer love. myBillBook has grown 12X in the last six months - today, over 3M businesses rely on the platform, recording over $6B in annualized transactions. SMBs come for billing, and stay for the product’s deep capabilities - maintaining inventory, managing AR & AP, building reports and more. The depth of use case and sophistication of the user-base is evident from the product being able to charge a SaaS fee from its users.

While myBillBook has rapidly become an essential tool for the SMB owner to manage their business, it’s only day one. With deep usage across supply chain participants and real-time capture of transactions, massive optionalities open up. Globally, SMB platforms like Quickbooks and Square have spawned whole businesses that have been built on top of their core accounting and payments use-cases.

We’re thrilled to partner with the FloBiz team and join hands with Greenoaks Capital and Beenext in furthering the team’s mission to accelerate the growth of Indian SMBs through digitization.