Tencent, Sequoia join $25 mn mega Series A round in Khatabook

Khatabook, one of the 17 startups selected as part of the maiden cohort of Sequoia Capital India’s accelerator programme Surge, has raised a $25 million in an outsized Series A funding round. Apart from Sequoia, investors in the round include Chinese technology conglomerate Tencent Holdings, GGV Capital, Partners of DST Global, RTP Ventures and US-based startup accelerator Y Combinator. 

The latest infusion takes the total capital raised by ADJ Utility Apps, the Bengaluru based company that owns Khatabook, to $29 million.

The Series A round also saw the participation of 20 angel investors including PayU co-founder Amrish Rau, former Facebook executive Anand Chandrasekharan, SoftBank executive Deep Nishar, Snapdeal founders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal, and Cred founder Kunal Shah, according to a statement. 

Founded in December last year by IIT Bombay alumni Ravish Naresh, Jaideep Poonia, Dhanesh Kumar and Ashish Sonone, Khatabook is a mobile app that enables small and medium enterprises to record and track business transactions. Prior to founding Khatabook, Naresh was founder of real estate platform Housing.com, while Poonia and Kumar were founders of automation platform Knit. 

The app claims to have recorded transactions worth $3 billion in August and currently claims more than 5 million registered users across 3,000 cities in the country. For most of our merchants, we are the first business software they've used in their entire life. And we will continue to build more India-first innovations to further enable the growth of what is still a largely untapped sector,” said Naresh. 

The company plans to launch other products for micro, small and medium enterprises in the next few months.

Startups such as Vyapar and OkCredit provide similar accounting automation platforms for small and medium enterprises. Last month, OkCredit raised $67 million in a Series B funding round from Tiger Global Management and Lightspeed Venture Partners and Vyapar raised a funding round from IndiaMart Intermesh and Axilor Ventures.