[Funding alert] Prime Venture Partners invests $1M in reconciliation software startup Recko

Early-stage fund Prime Venture Partners on Wednesday said it has invested $1 million in Bengaluru-based reconciliation software startup Recko. The startup will use the funds to expand its sales and technology teams while accelerating product development and data capabilities. 

Founded in 2017, by serial entrepreneurs Prashant Borde and Saurya Prakash Singh, Recko is a SaaS-based reconciliation platform that helps finance teams of commerce marketplaces as well as transaction platforms to keep track of the complete transaction lifecycle and commercial contracts, to prevent pilferage. 

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Saurya explains that multiple instruments, including wallet balance, vouchers, and others, are involved while making a payment during checkout at an online marketplace. The finance team, while reconciling data, also needs to keep in mind things such as product returns and payment settlements.

This is where Recko comes into play, helping finance teams reconcile data relating to payments against orders, while settling it with other stakeholders.

It does so by getting connected to payment gateways, banks, and the merchant's order management system through APIs. It helps the merchant in tracking receivables and identifying settlement discrepancies. The platform enables finance teams to ingest multiple data sources and reconcile millions of transactions in hours, instead of days, without writing a single line of code.

In the first 12 months since launch, Recko has reconciled transactions worth $2 billion, and is looking to scale this by 10x in the next year. Its early customers include Grofers, Meesho, and other Indian marketplaces across different industry sectors. The company at present has eight to 10 clients. The startup has recently also started working with various banks, NBFCs, and insurance companies; it is currently running successful pilots with them.

Speaking on the investment, Sanjay Swamy, Managing Partner, Prime Venture Partners, said,

“We invested in Recko because of the team’s first-hand experience in addressing a huge problem that every company has and one that will grow by orders of magnitude with digitisation. Reconciliation can only be solved by a neutral third party and has traditionally been handled via a brute-force approach of spreadsheets and a battery of analysts. Recko’s tech and AI-driven approach has been very well accepted in the industry. We’re delighted to see the progress and are grateful for the trust placed in them by marquee clients, in just their first year of operation.”

Learning from the past...

The founding duo graduated from IIT-Gandhinagar; Prashant was senior to Saurya. Saurya went on to join Flipkart’s marketplace in 2013 while Prashant decided to start up on his own, and co-founded distributed computing platform GridAnts (later Cubeit). 

In 2015, Saurya founded B2B delivery logistics startup Townrush, which got acquired by Grofers the same year. He then joined PhonePe in 2016, where he worked with Founders Sameer Nigam and Rahul Chari on the product in the early days, and was responsible for the recharge and the bill payment vertical.

GridAnts (later Cubeit), meanwhile, got sold to Myntra in 2016, after which Prashant went on to join Reliance Jio, where he oversaw aspects of the payment vertical. 

While working at all these organisations, Saurya and Prashant both noticed problems of reconciliation and felt the need for an automated system. This led to the launch of Recko. 

Saurya, CEO and Co-founder, explains:

“Prashant and I saw the limitation of Excels and manual reconciliation processes as we scaled Flipkart, Grofers, and Reliance Jio. Hiring more people to ensure standardised and accurate reconciliation process did not solve the problem. We see the current settlements and reconciliation process as a massive inefficiency in the payment lifecycle across industries such as banking, lending, insurance, telecom, ecommerce etc.”

...gearing up for the future

“We are humbled by the initial market response and are geared up to scale 10x our current volumes in the next year. At Recko we are on a mission to streamline every reconciliation flow in the transaction lifecycle and unlock massive efficiency and accuracy gains to make finance functions more strategic, efficient, and confident to the last penny,” he adds.

The startup has a team of 21 members as of now and is already piloting with companies across international geographies, including Southeast Asia, Middle East, and Africa. 

The founders believe that technology companies at these geographies face similar challenges when it comes to reconciliation of data. Apart from the transaction cycle, Recko’s platform also sees a use case in reconciling campaigns, discounting, and advertisements data that companies run on other platforms. 

Saurya and Prashant believe that, in the future, AI will play a greater role in helping organisations reduce anomalies in data, and ensure they don’t make the same mistakes. “Moving forward, the platform will get smarter and help organisations make better decisions to improve operational efficiencies.”

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