Bikayi is in talks to raise about $50 million in a new financing round, four people familiar with the matter told me, as the Indian startup looks to scale its platform that helps small businesses set up and run their e-commerce stores.
Tiger Global and Sequoia Capital India are holding conversations with the Indian startup to lead its Series B round, the sources said, requesting anonymity as the deliberations are ongoing and private. Sequoia Capital India, which led Bikayi’s $10.8 million Series A funding in September last year, is positioning to lead the round, two sources said.
Spokespeople for Bikayi, Sequoia Capital India, and Tiger Global declined to comment.
Bikayi allows businesses to collate and fulfil orders from various online and offline sources and accept payment digitally. Its platform also helps businesses set up their e-commerce stores on WhatsApp and also launch their own apps that they can distribute to customers.
The startup additionally maintains partnerships with delivery firms to help businesses ship products to customers. As one of its investors describes it, Bikayi is “building a powerful tool that integrates the entire infrastructure of commerce onto one single platform.”
Several of Bikayi’s offerings are available to businesses at no charge. But it takes a small fee if they wish to broaden their online product catalogs, it says on its website.
“The entire platform has been designed to enable easy integration with other applications to make it a single dashboard for everything the merchants need. It’s even more exciting to see the impact their product is having on small businesses – and the country’s employment rate,” wrote Shraeyansh Thakur, a principal at Sequoia Capital India, in a blog post last year.
Scores of firms, including Reliance Retail (the nation’s largest retail chain), e-commerce giant Amazon as well as startups such as Nexus Venture Partners-backed Jumbotail, Tribe Capital-backed Khatabook and Lightspeed Venture Partners-backed Dukaan, are helping merchants — sometimes in similar but also their own unique ways — digitize their businesses and reach more customers.
DotPe, another startup operating in the space, has amassed over 9 million customers and is clocking $4 million in ARR, according to an investor deck dated last month and reviewed by TechCrunch. The startup, which counts Google and Info Edge among its backers, has facilitated over 26 million transactions, it revealed in the investor deck.
ElasticRun, which is helping hundreds of thousands of neighborhood stores across hundreds of Indian cities and towns secure inventory and working capital, is in talks with SoftBank to raise about $200 million at a $1 billion valuation, TechCrunch reported earlier this month.
via https://www.aiupnow.com
Manish Singh, Khareem Sudlow
