Monday, September 30, 2019
Unlocking iPhones crucial in Unnao, Chinmayanand cases
What to expect from Microsoft's event on October 2: Surface Pro 7, Surface Laptop 3, an ARM-based Surface, and at least a teaser of a dual-screen device (Tom Warren/The Verge)
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Twitter is rolling out a filter that moves unwanted DMs containing questionable language or spam to an "additional messages" folder on Android, iOS, and the web (Jon Fingas/Engadget)
Twitter is rolling out a filter that moves unwanted DMs containing questionable language or spam to an “additional messages” folder on Android, iOS, and the web — Twitter is quickly acting on plans to filter potentially offensive direct messages. It's rolling out the filter to all users on Android, iOS and the web.
Samsung Galaxy Fold to Launch in India Today: What You Need to Know
Khatabook raises $25M to help businesses in India record financial transactions digitally and accept online payments
Even as tens of millions of Indians have come online for the first time in recent years, most businesses in the nation remain offline. They continue to rely on long notebooks to keep a log of their financial transactions. A nine-month old startup that is digitizing the bookkeeping and allowing merchants to accept online payments just raised a significant amount of capital.
Khatabook, a Bangalore-based startup, said on Tuesday it has raised $25 million in a new financing round. The Series A round for the startup was funded by GGV Capital, Partners of DST Global, RTP Ventures, Sequoia India, Tencent, and Y Combinator. A clutch of high-profile angel investors including Amrish Rau, Anand Chandrasekharan, Deep Nishar, Gokul Rajaram, Jitendra Gupta, Kunal Bahl, and Kunal Shah also participated in the round. The startup has raised $29 million to date.
Khatabook operates an eponymous Android app that allows small and medium businesses to keep a log of their financial transactions and accept payments online. The app, which was launched on Google Play Store in December last year, has amassed 5 million merchants from more than 3,000 cities, towns, and villages in India, Ravish Naresh, cofounder and CEO of Khatabook, told TechCrunch in an interview this week.
The app, which does not charge merchants, was used to process transactions worth more than $3 billion in August, said Naresh. Most merchants in developing markets are currently not online. They continue to rely on logging their financial transactions — credit, for instance — on notebooks and pieces of paper. As you can imagine, this methodology is not structured.
Even as Reliance Jio, a telecom operator launched by India’s richest man Mukesh Ambani, upended the Indian market and brought tens of millions of Indians online for the first time in last three years, most businesses in the country are still carrying out their operations without the use of any technology, said Naresh. “Could we build an app that makes it very easy for merchants to digitize their bookkeeping?” he said.
“As soon as we launched the app, we instantly started to go viral,” he said. For several months now, the startup is seeing 20% growth each month, he said. In six months, the app has helped businesses recover $5 billion in previously unpaid credits, Naresh claimed. Without any marketing, the app has also gained a significant number of users in Nepal, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, said Naresh.
“At Khatabook, we have taken early but significant steps towards leveraging this trend to digitize India’s shopkeepers. 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,” he said.
In a statement, Hans Tung, Managing Partner of GGV Capital, said, “as a global investor, we seek out founders who understand the local market and respond to growth opportunities with speed and agility – we certainly see this with the Khatabook team.”
Naresh, a cofounder of property startup Housing, said the startup will use the capital to build new features such as billing and invoicing to serve merchants. In next 12 months, Khatabook will aim to add 25 million businesses, he said.
A growing number of startups in India are attempting to help businesses. OkCredit, which raised $67 million last month, serves 5 million merchants. IndiaMART, a 23-year-old B2B firm that went public this year, led a round in a startup called Vyapar last month that is addressing similar problems.
Leaked images reveal the upcoming Surface Pro 7, Surface Laptop 3 (13-inch and 15-inch), and an ARM-powered Surface 2-in-1 device (Nick Statt/The Verge)
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Brands rely on influencers for visibility but fail to measure it
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Google confirms it is testing Duplex-powered Assistant for Chrome, initially with movie ticket booking websites like AMC and Fandango (Jules Wang/Android Police)
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Twitter to leave up a tweet about a "full-blown "hot" civil war" by a far-right militia with almost 24,000 followers; the militia was quote-tweeting Trump (Ryan Broderick/BuzzFeed News)
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Microsoft now lets OneDrive users expand 1TB storage in 200GB increments and launches OneDrive Personal Vault, to protect folders using 2FA, available globally (Mehedi Hassan/Thurrott)
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E-commerce cos add games to increase customer engagement
HDFC Bank and Paytm Payments Bank tops in the number of digital transactions
Videos of owners trying Tesla's new Smart Summon feature, which show Teslas autonomously driving to owners with varying degrees of success, go viral (Jason Torchinsky/Jalopnik)
Videos of owners trying Tesla's new Smart Summon feature, which show Teslas autonomously driving to owners with varying degrees of success, go viral — Just a few days ago, Tesla announced their new Version 10 software update, which included such things as the ability to play Cuphead …
Russia's finance minister says Russian companies have begun using bitcoin and other digital currencies in international payments to counter Western sanctions (Gleb Bryanski/Reuters)
Gleb Bryanski / Reuters : Russia's finance minister says Russian companies have begun using bitcoin and other digital currencies in i...
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Jake Offenhartz / Gothamist : Since October, the NYPD has deployed a quadruped robot called Spot to a handful of crime scenes and hostage...
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