Automated success: How Grexa is driving up revenue for MSMEs with AI
Navi Mumbai startup Grexa offers an automated digital marketing engine, which helps SMBs with everything—from acquiring new customers to creating campaigns to grow revenue.
The COVID-19 pandemic upended the micro, small, and medium enterprise (MSME) sector, with around 67% companies temporarily closing for three months, as per government estimates. Amidst this, many companies decided to adopt digital technologies to survive, and 68% of them saw positive results.
Nonetheless, a large number of MSMEs shied away from using technology that could benefit them. A few years later, Testbook CEO and Co-founder Ashutosh Kumar, along with Testbook’s founding team, launched SaaS startup Grexa to help small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) grow using GenAI.
“Presently, every company has become digitised. In a city like Bengaluru, for example, if there are 1,000 searches happening for a service, 80-90% of those discoveries are going to the bigger brands. Only 10% are going to smaller businesses,” Kumar tells YourStory.
He adds, “We realised this was an inevitable problem. We wanted to figure out a way where small businesses would be able to tap into the digital growth of the country.”
Grexa models itself after the San Francisco-based Owner.com, a company optimising online growth for restaurants.
The Navi Mumbai-based startup employs 50 people, and besides Kumar, the founding team includes CMO Narendra Agrawal, CTO Ayush Varshney, and CPO Arpit Oswal.
Digitising India—One SMB at a time
Instead of building tech to solve one particular issue, the team at Grexa decided to make an automated digital marketing engine that will do everything—from acquiring new customers to creating marketing campaigns for SMBs to grow revenue.
“Since we were targeting SMBs from all sorts of sectors, we realised that creating tech to improve operations for each sector doesn’t make sense,” he says.
Once a business opts to work with Grexa, its AI agents begin their work. First, they optimise the business’s Google Business Profile (GBP), ensuring it is at the top of the discovery results. The moment a customer shows interest, the tech automatically captures the lead, and an AI agent starts conversing with the customer.
“This ensures that instead of converting one in every 10 leads, it converts four. Once the customer gets on board, the entire journey from them being a prospective lead to a proper customer becomes the intelligence for marketing campaigns run by AI,” Kumar explains.
As the business grows, Grexa’s AI agents begin urging customers to leave a review on Google.
Further, it also creates avenues for revenue on the campaign front. For instance, if it’s a hair salon business, Grexa’s AI agents create a campaign before a festival, asking its customers to get a haircut.
“It [AI agent] can also figure out how many people in an SMB’s customer base are relevant for a particular marketing campaign and only nudges those people,” he says.
The real-time conversations happen over WhatsApp in a humanised manner—going through all the data to help a customer avail the business. Some primary sectors in Grexa’s radar include salons, gyms, restaurants, bakeries, and medical clinics, among others.
Grexa uses multiple large language models (LLMs) in its backend, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic AI, for various purposes. The startup also applies its own algorithm on top of these LLM models to activate its automated cycle.
Business in the MSME sector
The business-to-business (B2B) startup offers its services across two subscription models: a quarterly model that costs Rs 15,000, and an annual model worth Rs 48,000.
For paid clients, Grexa reviews their GBP and shares detailed insights on how to improve it. They also get access to an app, where they can find all sorts of data and a transparent communication channel. Besides, its AI agents write SEO-optimised content for the SMBs.
The startup also offers a free model, where it creates a webpage for the business in Grexa’s domain and reviews their GBP, helps with AI-generated SEO services, creates physical UPI QR codes, and answers any queries the business owners might have regarding SEO.
“So far, we have about 25,000 clients, including free and paid customers. We plan on getting almost 5 lakh free customers by the end of the year, which would naturally increase our paid customer numbers as well,” Kumar explains.
Among the 63 million registered MSMEs in India, Grexa is targeting urban micro-enterprises—companies making less than Rs 5 crore in revenue.
Priti Gajora, owner of Mumbai-based Peacock Salon, a client of Grexa, says the company helped them compete with bigger chains online. “Our visibility was low, and most of our clients came through word of mouth. Grexa helped us see a 60% increase in footfall, and we now receive calls from 20-25 clients every week,” she says.
Funding and the future
Grexa separates itself from its competitors, like Bengaluru company LeadSquared, through its tech and outcome.
“What we fundamentally focus on is getting more business for an SMB. We are optimising a business for better discovery on Google, a neutral platform. We are targeting the entire problem statement rather than just creating graphics or just writing content,” Kumar shares.
In July this year, Grexa raised $1.8 million in a seed round led by Offline Club founder and iSeed partner Utsav Somani, with participation from DeVC, Bharat Founders Fund, Vernalis Capital and a clutch of angel investors.
Somani believes the startup is solving a ‘burning problem’ for the MSME sector, as good marketing is either ‘too complex or too expensive’.
“Its AI-led marketing platform is a game-changer. What makes me bet big on this? The founders are battle-tested operators who’ve built and scaled at the highest level. This is exactly the kind of tech disruption that creates a massive impact,” Somani adds.
Kumar says Grexa plans to use the funds to further build its product and technology.
“I think we are one of the first companies to take this approach of building a simple, easy-to-use autonomous product in this category. So, driving even more revenue for businesses through our product is very crucial for us,” he adds.
Edited by Suman Singh