Indian Startup Story - Khatabook, Business hua Easy!

Either find a way or make one, the proverb has been proved right by Vaibhav Kalpe, the founder of 'Khatabook'. Kalpe hails from Deglur village in Nanded district of Maharashtra.

 

Vaibhav Kalpe's father used to run an electrical shop in Deglur. Like many small-time shopkeepers, his father faced lot of problems in recovering money from customers buying goods on credit. His father found it very difficult to keep track on pending recoveries, constantly following up with debtors, etc. Seeing the hardships of his father, Vaibhav learned online coding and created a simple Android based app for his shop. He called it ‘KhataBook’. Khatabook was nothing but the ageold Bahi Khata in online,mobile format.

 

 

With its ease of utility and benefits, it soon became popular with small and micro business owners. No sooner did Vaibhav launch it on Google play store, It had more than 60,000 subscribers by 2018. Vaibhav had decided to settle in Deglur and after the family business after his father decided to retire. But his destiny had some very big plans for him. His app had caught the attention of all the right people. A Venture Capitalist had approached him about a possible investment in Khatabook. Ravish Naresh, co-founder of Housing.com, was also in touch with Vaibhav. During that time, Ravish had launched a start-up called kyte.ai with his college friends. After much deliberations, Vaibhav agreed to meet Ravish. Ravish managed to convince Vaibhav to join his team. The Kyte team made some changes to the KhataBook app and relaunched it on the Play Store. The team were expecting that the app would reach more people than the existing 60,000 users with the help of new modifications. But none of them had any idea what the future held.

 

 

 

Khatabook  has raised $25 million last year from companies such as Sequoia India (India's largest venture capital company), Tencent Holdings, China and others. This Chinese investment has brought the Khatabook into spotlight against the backdrop of the current Indo-China tensions. In March 2020, KhataBook raised $60 million with the help of B Capital Group. That is when former India captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni also invested in the start-up.

 

 

During initial lockdown days of the Covid pandemic, when malls and supermarkets were closed, general grocery stores helped millions of people get their daily necessities. The Facebook Jio agreement will extend Jio Mart through WhatsApp (a company owned by Facebook) to such small shoppers. In the future, technology will help these small grocery stores compete with multinational supermarkets. How this startup develops in the future is of course a matter of great curiosity.

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