Raipur, Chattisgarh-based fintech start-up for Indian SMEs, GimBooks, has raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from a network (syndicate) of angel investors pooled in by First Check Ventures through the US-based AngelList platform. The seed funding round was led by Ali Jamal, Founding Partner at First Check Ventures. US-based start-up accelerator Y Combinator also invested in GimBooksby infusing an investment of US $ 1, 25000 into the start-up.
Notably, this is the first funding round raised by GimBooks since its inception in 2018; prior to this, the start-up was bootstrapped. GimBooks will be utilizing the newly-raised funds to ramp up its team, product development and to accelerate customer acquisition via increased marketing spends.
Speaking about the fundraise, Yash Raj Agarwal, Founder & CEO, GimBooks says, “We are delighted to announce the first-ever funding round of GimBooks, which enables us to fast-track our growth and customer acquisition, and strengthens our commitment to provide high-quality solutions for millions of small and medium sized businesses in India. We are grateful to our investors — First Check Ventures and Y Combinator for the instating their faith in us. Going forward, more and more SMEs of our country will continue to show an increased inclination towards digitization and tech adoption in the years to come, and while leveraging on this trend, we at GimBooks remain committed to continuously serving the SME ecosystem.”
GimBooks, which was launched originally an invoice-maker app in 2018, hasevolved over the years into a full-fledged bookkeeping, accounting, lending and banking platform dedicated to empower India’s MSME and SME entrepreneurs.GimBooks operates on a freemium model; the start-up has already acquired 12, 500 paid users, and is looking to cross a milestone of 25,000paid users by the end of the current year. Notably, GimBooks is currently in talks with a few more international investors to raise its Pre-Series A funding round in the upcoming months.
During the last quarter, i.e. FY Quarter 1 (Q 1: April to June ‘21) of the current financial year, GimBooks has clocked a revenue of INR 75 lakhs, whereas in the ongoingFY Quarter 2 (Q 2: July to September ’21), the start-up is on track to cross more than INR 1 crore revenue. Furthermore, the start-up is, at the moment, growing at a rate of15-20% Month-on-Month (MOM), and has reached nearly 2 million installs of its flagship mobile app. GimBooks’ long term mission is to become the most trusted and go-to ‘platform of choice’ for all SMEs in India and ensure to be able to cater to their financial and business management needs in comprehensive and sustainable manner.
