Y Combinator-backed startup Kodo Grow is making spending easier for companies like MobiKwik, Epigamia
Deepti Sanghi has worked in startups and traditional financial services institutions such as SBI Capital Markets and Edelweiss Capital. In her career as an investment banker, she was impressed by the impact that credit offers have on businesses – small, medium and large entities – and the people who run them. Credit given by microfinance institutions helped businesses grow faster.
Also, she was also the ‘Finance Mitra’ entrepreneur in her network who would turn to her for help.
“These are well-educated people with all the resources and very passionate about building their startups and products, but don’t want to deal with the complexities and all the worries when it comes to finances,” she explains. his story,
In 2019, he launched Codo, a corporate card startup aimed at relieving founders from the worry of managing the company’s money and optimizing cash flow. Based in Mumbai, the venture was also an attempt to become a “scale finance friend”.
simplify finance
After it took three months for Deepti to get the corporate card from the bank she had been banking on for over a decade, despite a clean credit record, she decided to start by trying to address this pain point.
Therefore, Kodo’s first and main product was a corporate credit card with an integrated expense management system for businesses through a mobile application.
The startup’s system allows companies to issue multiple cards to their team members who can then easily enter receipts on their mobile app. Once receipts are uploaded, the Kodo app generates expense reports automatically, saving the time and hassle of manually filing receipts and getting them reimbursed later.
Kodo Pay allows direct payments to all sellers via direct bank transfer or Unified Payments Interface (UPI), even if they do not accept card payments. After this companies can pay the code at the end of the month or on the EMI plan of three months.
“The complexity of money lies in control and compliance when it comes to business. And we are leveraging technology to solve the money management experience just like individual payments,” she says.
Some of Kodo’s clients include Grove, InShorts, Mobikwik, Jupy, Epigamia, Blue Tokai Coffee, Plum, and Coinswitch Kuber.
Having partnered with State Bank of Mauritius for card issuance and ICICI Bank for other components, Kodo offers discounts on purchases of laptops and mobiles along with partner companies like Amazon Web Services and Azure.
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be an entrepreneur
Deepti has always been keen on running a business. Growing up in a business family in Delhi, she immersed herself in the biographies of entrepreneurs, reading about the journey of sustainable businesses such as The Body Shop, Virgin Atlantic Airlines, Google and Starbucks.
While she was certain to become an entrepreneur, she decided to venture into investment banking after completing her MBA in Finance and Marketing from the Institute of Management Development in Gurugram.
“I helped companies raise private equity funding and work on merger and acquisition transactions with a strong focus on the financial services sector. I did this to understand the business ecosystem, and it was a well-paying job that gave me entrepreneurship. Helped me accumulate some savings before venturing into the industry,” she says, adding that she was also making seed investments in startups.
Keeping in mind the importance of technology to build a scalable business, Deepti joined Mumbai-based fintech platform MoneyTap in 2016. the rest is history.
Navigating the Fintech Market
The Indian fintech market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12 percent between 2022 and 2027. Deepti assures that there are not many companions with platforms as wide as Kodo.
While banks have their own corporate card offerings, many prefer State Bank Of Mauritius And ICICI Bank We are ready to collaborate and develop to the best of Kodo’s technical capabilities.
Notably, the increase in digital adoption during the pandemic was not limited to consumers, as most companies also started adopting digital needs.
“They were spending a lot on online advertising to raise awareness and for that they needed cards to spend on online marketing. Since it did away with a distributed workforce, they needed to subscribe to a lot more tools to run a digital business. Tech-savvy corporate cards became essential to those pens,” she notes.
In addition to the challenges of adapting to regulatory changes, Kodo saw strong growth in 2020 and was selected in the 2021 winter batch of Y Combinator. Through the connections developed there, it raised $8.75 million in a seed funding round from a group of investors. Brex, Goat Capital, Pioneer Fund and other Silicon Valley investors are included.
