India's business services platform IndiaFilings raised Rs 32 crore $4.3 million in a pre-Series A round of investment from boutique investment banking firm CreedCap Asia Advisors, Singapore-based venture capital firm Beenext and Mumbai-based family office Udtara Ventures.
This is the first institutional investment funding raised by the company. A secondary component is used to provide full exits to early angel investors founders Lionel Charles, co-founder and CEO, said the primary component will be used to increase growth and increase its paying customer base.
The company was founded in 2014 and offers a wide variety of business registration and compliance services under three verticals. The oldest and largest vertical IndiaFilings platform is a unified platform for government services. It caters to company incorporation, GST, income tax, and intellectual property services. Ledgers, a Software as a Service SaaS product, offers services such as GST invoicing and filing, payroll, inventory management, input tax reconciliation, payment gateway management, and connected banking. Ledgers is integrated with the ICICI Bank and SBM Bank for connected banking, the GSTN Portal, Income Tax Portal and different payment gateway solutions. EQL offers a wide variety of financial products, including pre-paid cards and neo banking.
We believe in providing affordable and accessible services for the masses. For instance, we have made it extremely easy and affordable for people to register a business in India - which was not really the case when we started in 2014. There is a lot of headroom for such accessible and affordable solutions in the domain we operate, according to Charles.
The seven-year-old company is profitable with 50 crore of revenue in the financial year 2020 -- 21, according to Charles. It employs over 500 people and operates in Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra markets. He said the company has served over one lakh paid customers so far.
The technology services market is 3 x larger than the software industry and India is yet to see 100 per cent adoption of DIY software. The platforms under EQL ensure that businesses are efficiently using all government services and get to spend more time building their businesses. EQL is able to service businesses at 1 4th cost compared to the offline professional services market due to its robust tech platform coupled with well-trained agents assisting the customer. Vishal Pereira, Managing Director at CreedCap Asia, said that we have seen rapid adoption and healthy retention in the last 24 months.
IndiaFilings is against heavily funded Clear formerly ClearTax Kalaari Capital-backed Vakilsearch in compliance tech and business services space. It competes against a lot of start-ups like Razorpay, EnKash, and Karbon Card in the business card market.