It was 2017 when serial entrepreneurs Harsh Pokharna, Gaurav Kumar, and Aditya Prasad realised that despite the proliferation of digital payment instruments and point of sale machines, most customers purchase goods on credit recorded in a notebook. Small businesses are yet to completely digitise their bookkeeping processes.
Their interactions with daily grocery stores helped them understand that most of the accounting and credit given by these shopkeepers were recorded on paper; small pieces that could easily be misplaced.
This system meant that it took longer to calculate and also lacked the aspect of ‘trust’ since there was no way to verify the accounts. This is what led them to start a digital-based credit balance recording solution for small business owners later that year.
As of September 2019, OkCredit claims a registered base of seven million merchants. The startup claims to be witnessing nearly four million monthly active sessions on the app in recent months. This is a considerable growth since June when the startup had a download base of 1.3 million merchants, 900,000 of whom were monthly active merchants.
Investors have taken notice of the startup’s success. In June 2019, OkCredit stated that it had raised $15.5 million as a part of its Series A round led by Tiger Global Management. The round also saw participation from new investor Morningside Venture Capital as well as existing investors Lightspeed India Partners, Venture Highway, and Y Combinator. Lightspeed had also made an initial seed investment in the company.
Just three months later, OkCredit raised $67 million as part of its Series B fundraise from Lightspeed (India and US) as well as Tiger Global. This round took OkCredit’s total fundraise from June 2019 to September 2019 to $83 million.
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