
Tribe, Moore Strategic lead Series C for India's Khatabook

Tribe Capital and Moore Strategic Ventures have led a $100 million Series C round for Khatabook – an India-based bookkeeping app aimed at small merchants – at a valuation of $600 million.
Alkeon Capital also came in as a new investor, while existing backers B Capital Group, Sequoia Capital India, Tencent Holdings, RTP Global, Unilever Ventures, and Better Capital re-upped. Balaji Srinivasan, a former Coinbase CTO, Sriram Krishnan, previously of Twitter, Snap, and Facebook, participated as individual investors. Both are now general partners at Andreessen Horowitz.
The round was oversubscribed, according to a statement.
Founded in 2018, Khatabook helps micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) - typically neighborhood shops - preserve digital records of payments owed. It sends payment reminders to customers who can settle their accounts through online channels. Khatabook routes transactions through payment service providers and receives a convenience fee for its efforts.
The company claims more than 10 million monthly active users, who in turn, serve 264 million customers. Merchants from 95% of Indian districts are represented on the app.
Khatabook has introduced several new products to complement its core digital ledger offering: a software-as-a-service (SaaS) business management tool; a staff management platform that enables merchants to digitize HR; and a cash handling and tracking solution that has been carved out from Khatabook to meet the needs of users looking for basic solutions.
New initiatives include building out the company’s financial services capabilities to cover lending, payments, and deposits, and adding talent across engineering, product development, design, analytics, and data science. It is also launching a $10 million buyback of share options granted to employees and early investors via ESOP, while enlarging the overall ESOP pool to $50 million.
Khatabook was part of Sequoia’s inaugural group of start-ups backed by Surge, an accelerator program for Indian and Southeast Asian start-ups.
It raised a $25 million Series A in 2019 from DST Global, GGV Capital, Sequoia, Tencent, and Y Combinator China. They re-upped in a $60 million Series B in 2020 led by B Capital, and also featuring RTP, Hummingbird Ventures, Falcon Edge Capital, Rocketship.vc, and Unilever Ventures.
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