Technology for MSMEs: The company is looking to grow 60-80 percent year-on-year in customer count and expecting similar growth in revenues
The shift towards adoption of digital technology solutions among micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) has been apparent with startups digitizing almost every part of the business viz., lending, bookkeeping, procurement of goods, selling goods and services, sales and marketing, recruitment, and more across multiple sectors. The opportunity, hence, in digitizing small businesses is expanding — around $85 billion by 2024 from around $30 billion in 2019, according to a Zinnov report. The growth is also because startups are increasingly turning into a one-stop shop or an end-to-end provider of technology solutions instead of specializing in one aspect.
For instance, Bengaluru-based Getafix Technologies, primarily a mobile app development company, offers around seven other solutions including software development, product development, UX/UI design, DevOps, workforce digitization, customer service bots, HR management software, and more. The company was launched in 2017 by Asif Bhat who earlier ran the offshore development centre in India for Kuwait-based loans and insurance platform FinFirst Capital.
“I was developing apps for their customers for around a year leading a local team of around 15 people before it struck me that why I’m not doing it for myself to support MSMEs and other business in the country. So, I started by building a product company developing mobile apps and quickly expanded to the services side as well. However, Covid halted our growth as we couldn’t get new clients until last year,” Bhat told Financial Express Online. The company had 10 clients in 2020 that grew to 18 so far including MPower Financing, CAMSDATA, Alchemy, Finch, and others across the UK, US, Australia, Germany, and India.
Getafix caters to the fintech, retail, banking, and e-commerce sectors to ideate, design, test, and release solutions. The company had earlier this week launched an AI-powered data extractor and data mapping solution Scanroid to automate the data entry process. The solution can scan and convert data from forms, documents, and images into text-based digital data. Getafix said the solution can parse documents in more than 200 languages and reduces errors by 52 percent and manual document processing costs by 35 percent.
“Let’ says if the document is a resume, our solution can extract phone number, email, candidate’s qualification, last company, calculate total years of experience. The solution can scan other documents like the I-20 form for a student visa in the US, GST invoice format, etc,” added Bhat.
However, almost the entire SME customer base of the company, which makes up 40 percent of the latter’s total customers, has sought mobile app or web app development only to digitize their business processes.
“We are a one-stop-shop for MSMEs’ to build their mobile apps, web applications, and websites; test them and make them live. However, digital penetration in the MSME sector is restricted. There is almost zero penetration in small manufacturing businesses. For instance, MSMEs building railroad tracks or water tankers don’t use digital mobile apps. However, to manage finance or to receive payments, make payments, bookkeeping, etc., they are open to using apps,” said Bhat.
Getafix’s prices for MSMEs are lower by at least half of the market price to attract more customers. “To create an app for let’s say a Kirana store owner, there are various templates available in the market. You simply have to change the color and work on UI a bit. If the Kirana store owner doesn’t seek any major change in the template, then it would not cost more than Rs 1 lakh for the app vis-a-vis standard market price of Rs 3-3.5 lakh,” noted Bhat.
The company is now looking to grow 60-80 percent year-on-year in customer count and expecting similar growth in revenues from Rs 3 crore currently to nearly Rs 5 crore in the current financial year. Also, the 25-member team is expected to grow to around 70 members. Bootstrapped so far, Getafix is now looking to raise equity funding.
Attribution-Financial express
