India is moving towards digitalisation faster than any of us can think or predict. Today, every business, from a microenterprise (like a kirana store) to a startup to a fast-growing mid-market company and even a conglomerate, is feeling the pinch of rapidly changing regulations. All of these businesses have traditionally maintained volumnious paperwork, with essentially no digital trail of expenses, invoices, transactions whatsoever. So today, they want to automate as quickly as possible—a process that will save them crores every year in manual work.
In order to empower these small and mid companies digitally, Delhi-based fintech startup Kite, an expense management platform where businesses can control their employees’ spending, track their costs and hand out rewards, has introduced a unique offering—Kite Tab. Kite Tab is an expense tracking and reimbursements solution featuring fully-customisable corporate credit and prepaid cards, powered by Mastercard and RuPay and Kite Grub, a physical meal card that can be used at any food outlet that accepts a debit card.
READ ALSO | 5 investment options for 2019 to get good return and keep your money safe
The startup was founded in 2017 by Priyanka Kanwar and Prabhtej Singh Bhatia. Currently, the startup has customers from Kota, Ahmedabad, Rajnandgaon and several tier-2/3 cities. Although it caters to every business size, the primary target segment is a mid-sized business with up to 750-1000 employees in rapidly growing and operations-intensive industries, such as FMCG, retail, logistics, and pharma.
“We wanted to specifically build a viable, affordable, and innovative solution these SMBs desperately need to form a solid foundation for their businesses. Today, our technology is helping businesses eliminate these inefficiencies that have dragged down profits for decades, like leakages, lost GST input credit savings, delays, and lost tax savings for employees. We are doing this by automating end-to-end their high-frequency transactions that run the business day-to-day, such as employee expenses, incentives, and employee benefits,” said Priyanka Kanwar, co-founder and CEO of Kite.
For Kite, its closest competitor is the traditional mindset and manual expense management via paperwork and Excel. In addition, private banks providing cards to corporates are also competitors, although again—these solutions are primarily available to very large banking clients and are plain vanilla, i.e., they do not come with the set of powerful SaaS features that a technology company like Kite can build.
“On the customer front, we have Radisson Blu, V2 Retail, IB Group, Delhi Public School, Mr. Makhana, and more. We’re serving both startups and established businesses all across India. We’ve processed over Rs 500 crore worth of transactions, serving 100,000-plus users from over 1500 cities,” said Kanwar.
Kite now intends to reach out to 1 million SMBs and 10 million employees in five years.