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| Edited By: Ashish K Tiwari |Source: DNA |Updated: Mar 22, 2018, 02:07 AM IST
We started the company as a consulting firm for corporate restructuring, business plan, technology and ERP implementation because of our prior consulting experience. It was during that process we realised that the SMEs were being taken for a ride by technology and ERP companies. We also realised that most SMEs are bothered about revenue efficiency rather than operational efficiencies, which is done through ERP. Operational efficiency can be achieved once you have a scale, and what SMEs were concerned about was their day-to-day running and whether they will be able to sustain for the coming months – it's more of a survival game. Our meetings with several SMEs showed that the one thing common across all of them was working capital issue. So there are companies that raise of a lot of invoices and but have no clue when the money will come from which customer. And that's precisely the issue that SpiderG is providing a solution to.
There are about 40 million small and medium businesses in India which deals with approximately 11 billion invoices in a year. The common problem among all of them is that they are drowning under the paper trail for tracking their finances. Entrepreneurs need to keep a tab on everyday deals, they require a management information system report to track all transactions, and even need to keep track of all business related conversations for updates and follow-ups. Most of that is currently done manually and requires spending a lot of time and energy over making invoices, manually uploading them on the company system and following up on payments and deals. That's a massive waste of time, but since small businesses don't have a lot of money to throw at there is no other option to solve this problem.
Our solution 'SpiderG' helps SMEs streamlines external and internal communication and, track and manage receivable and payables efficiently. The technology is helping SMEs tackle their challenges like, improve cash visibility and its management, exchange smart invoices, purchase orders and other documents, have organised communication with other businesses as well as internally over specific transactional documents and seamlessly integrate with existing systems like Tally and SAP.
We currently serve around 350 businesses from across India and the plan is to take this number to 20,000 in a year. Majority of the features offered by our application is free for now as the focus is on building more traction and getting businesses used to using the technology. There are a few add-on features like the Dashboard and Cash-Cal that are subscription-based and gives us some revenues. We are targeting revenues of Rs 1.5 crore this year. Next year we will target for Rs 20 crore because we will have a whole bunch of revenue streams.
We are expecting to break even in the last quarter of the third year, post which profitability will start kicking in. In the longer run, once we are able to create a network, we can become a de-facto application for other business applications as well. The idea is to make SpiderG a platform and integrate it with other applications so that the user doesn't have to download separate applications for other business related activities.
We have raised seed capital from top industry veterans – Rahul Kirloskar, executive chairman, Kirloskar Pneumatic Co Ltd, Pravin Dongre, Fusion Tech Venture and Adi Sarvanan, founder and president, Allsec Technologies. The amount raised so far is to the tune of $150,000. We will be adding a lot new features to the application and there are plans to also tap the international markets, for which funding will be required. We will be raising a pre-Series A of around $5 million and then go for one more round of funding. We would not raise any money thereafter to avoid dependency on investors.
