India’s OkCredit raises $67M to help small merchants digitize their bookkeeping

OkCredit, a Bangalore-based startup that enables small merchants to digitize their bookkeeping, has raised $67 million in a new financing round to grow its business in the nation.

The Series B financing round for the two-year-old startup was led by Lightspeed and Tiger Global. The new round, which follows the Series A in June, increases OkCredit’s total raise to $83 million.

OkCredit operates an eponymous mobile app that allows merchants to keep track of their day-to-day purchases and sales. Last month, OkCredit founders told TechCrunch in an interview that the app had amassed more than 5 million active merchants across 2,000 cities in India.

Amy Wu, a partner at Lightspeed US, said OkCredit’s active users have grown 76 times since the beginning of the year. It’s one of the fastest-growing companies we’ve seen and reflects the incredible virality and network effects of the business,” Wu added.

A wide range of merchants, from roadside vendors to grocery shop owners and pharmacies, have joined OkCredit.

Even as more than 500 million users in India today are online, most merchants in the nation are yet to digitize their business, according to industry estimates. They still rely on large notebooks to keep a log of their transactions.

“Technology has moved from collecting payments in cash, to using point-of-sale machines. More recently, QR codes, paper bills turned to printed bills. But the one thing that has not changed is the fact that most customers still purchase goods on credit recorded in a notebook,” Harsh Pokharna, chief executive of OkCredit said in a statement.

Pokharna told TechCrunch today that the startup will use the capital to hire more people and grow its merchant user base. The startup also plans to build more products for merchants.

Vyapar and KhataBook are two more startups in India that are attempting to solve a similar problem.

In a statement, Harsha Kumar, a partner at Lightspeed, said, “technology adoption in India will happen across sectors and segments. For the longest time, mSME as a segment was ignored but we have seen through Udaan, OkCredit and other Lightspeed investments in the SME space that tech usage is growing rapidly. Very excited and honored to have a front row seat in this journey!”