Chhavideep Singh
Source: Go Trading Asia
BukuKas is a neo-banking start-up that aims to digitise SMEs in the South-East Asian countries, introducing them to the digital ecosystem. Most recently, the start-up has announced to raise USD 10 million in funding from Sequoia Capital India to help Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) digitise their operations.
Indonesia is one country where Small and Medium businesses still use the traditional book-keeping system to log their income and expenditure and it accounts for about 60% of the country’s gross domestic item, as mentioned by CrunchBase in a report. There is no harm with manual book-keeping except that since COVID-19 pandemic has struck, these businesses and enterprises have suffered the most.
The problem here is identifiable and the BukuKas brings the solution by helping several start-ups to go digital with their book-keeping and other operations to continue with their business and not solely stay reliable on offline sales.
The start-up recently received USD 10 million funding and it aims to build a complete end-to-end software stack for SMEs to digitise themselves across a wide range of activities. The company plans to build an SME-focused digital bank in the future to expand its operations and bring value to these start-ups.
Founded in 2019 by Krishnan Menon and Lorenzo Peracchione, BukuKas has raised total funding worth USD 22 million with participation from existing investors including January Capital, Endeavor Catalyst, Cambium Grove, Saison Capital, Founderbank Capital, Amrish Rau and Sequoia Capital India’s Surge being the latest one.
According to a report by TechCrunch, the two co-founders started their business with digital bookkeeping after speaker to more than 1,000 merchants. It is also mentioned that helping start-ups to enable digital bookkeeping would generate good data which in-turn can be used to branch out into other financial services.
Co-founder Menon confirms that the company is eventually planning to enter into an SME-focused digital bank after providing Small and Medium Enterprises with an end-to-end software stack to fully enable digitisation.
The COVID-19 pandemic has been rough for businesses, especially SMEs who have just started out. As we understand that the economy of almost the whole world has been down the drain in the past year because of nation-wide lockdowns, businesses were bound to shut down bearing immeasurable losses. Only digitally active businesses were prone to profitability as everyone switched to the online availability of services.
BukuKas is one such start-up that is helping Small and Medium businesses to enable their operations on a digital platform so that they continue to grow beyond offline reliability.
Menon further mentions in a statement that initially BukuKas’s Series A funding will be utilised for user acquisitions to onboard more and more merchants and retailers on the platforms, introduce new services to these clients. Besides this, the start-up aims to settle engineering and products teams in Jakarta and Bengaluru to begin operations. Furthermore, BukuKas plans on expanding into newer Southeast Asian markets, but for now, its main focus is on the SMEs ecosystem in Indonesia, as mentioned by Menon in a statement.