B2B commerce platform Bikayi has raised $2 million in seed funding from a group of international investors including early-stage fund, Mantis Ventures, Y Combinator, Pioneer Fund, amongst other notable investors.
The business will use the finances for growth and expansion through hiring extra talent and onboarding newer merchants on its platform. The year-old undertaking allows small businesses to quickly create their online shops and supply them the right equipment to control e-commerce at the Whatsapp platform. At present, the Bikayi app is only available on the Google Play store.
The company felt graceful that prominent investors showed interest in Bikayi. In this technique, they’re a part of upscaling Bikayi. With those budget companies can accelerate product improvement, ramp up the platform, and onboard a million new merchants,” said Sonakshi Nathani, co-founder, Bikayi.
Nathani adds that merchants on Bikayi are already doing day by day transactions worth more than ₹2 crore on its platform. Further to this, Bikayi is currently being utilized by grocery stores, wholesalers, manufacturers, and retailers from extra than 3000 towns throughout India.
“Bikayi is the company I have an interest in in the complete YC batch — they have got many opportunities to become the storefront of preference for the millions of small nearby businesses in India — and eventually the entire developing world. They make trade both local and private, which is crucial for achievement in India, and their growth numbers communicate for themselves,” said Ankur Nagpal, an angel Investor who additionally participated in the latest round of funding.
“Bikayi’s founders combine deep expertise of their small business clients with top tier product execution. We loved that their product makes every body’s lives simpler, while fitting clearly into the way business is accomplished,” said Tim Suzman, general accomplice at Pioneer Fund.
Currently, greater than 53% of Bikayi’s merchants are coming from Tier 3 & four towns. The COVID-induced lockdown completely disrupted supply chains, earlier this year, inflicting even huge e-commerce firms to depend on Indian kiranas for making delivery of essentials to customers. This has opened an opportunity for digitizing kiranas and equipping them with technology services around reconciliation, digital payments, store accounting, digital credit, and other areas.
These days e-commerce primary, Amazon India in June, announced the launch of its virtual kirana solution – ‘smart stores’, which allowed kiranas to have a digital storefront. Through the launch of ‘smart stores’, Amazon Pay allowed customers to discover the products to be had with the kirana, and shop the same by either paying through UPI or converting the transaction price into an EMI. There is also Reliance Industries’ e-commerce platform JioMart which has been operating on digitizing the storefront and allowing customers to order from their neighborhood shops, online.
