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All of this time and generation is about making things easier, be it shopping or payment. Now, when you ought to make things easier for the consumer, it becomes imperative to make it easier for the service providers as well.
Following the same thought, Sampad Swain, Akash Gehani and Aditya Sengupta co-founded Instamojo in September 2012. Instamojo is a payment gateway for MSMEs that allows them to accept all kinds of payments and transfers.
- Company Name-Instamojo
- Headquarter-Bangalore
- Sector-Financial Services
- Founders-Sampad Swain, Akash Gehani, Aditya Sengupta
- Founded-2012
- Parent Organization-Instamojo Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
- Website-instamojo.com
Instamojo - About and How It Works?
Back when incepted in 2012, Instamojo started as a solution provider of digital payments which now has progressively grown into a robust online payment gateway for enterprises like micro, small, and medium. So that they start, manage, and grow their businesses online.
All in all, like most fintech startups in the country, Instamojo has turned into a full-stack digital services platform overtime with the sole vision of constructively bridging the gap between MSMEs business, who find it hard to leverage and optimally use the right technology and developers in reaching out to the relevant application users.
MojoCapital
This product from Instamojo helps disperse bite-sized short-term credit loans which are worth in and around $2 million. MojoCapital caters primarily to its merchants on a monthly basis, and it has shown a projected growth of 25% on the month on monthly basis.
MojoXpress
MojoXpress is often regarded as the logistics arm of Instamojo, and helps MSMEs deliver its products to their respective customers. Not very surprisingly, It is touching close to 1,000 shipments per month.
Instamojo - Pricing
In Instamojo you can also create your Free online store, where you can make changes to Add Product and customize your store. The online store builder has an inbuilt payment gateway, where merchants can sell and manage their online store.
Instamojo - Target Market Size
“Today, the MSME sector in India contributes to 37 per cent of the country’s GDP and employs over 117 million people. The scope of growth for this sector is enormous; however, the presence of several challenges, especially the lack of knowledge on several business-specific elements, prevents this.
A major roadblock we identified was that several MSMEs did not know where to source information from. Through the mojoVersity platform, we aim to democratize knowledge transfer by making available course content that will help small business owners learn and be more aware of the nuances required to run and sustain a business.” said Sampad Swain, the founder of Instamojo.
Instamojo - Founders and Team
The founders of Instamojo are Sampad Swain, Akash Gehani and Aditya Sengupta.
- Instamojo Founders - Aditya Sengupta (Left), Sampad Swain, Akash Gehani (Right)
- Instamojo Founders - Aditya Sengupta (Left), Sampad Swain, Akash Gehani (Right)
- Sampad Swain - Graduated from IBS Hyderabad, Swain has had his hands on quite a few startups. Before Instamojo, he has co-founded DealsandYou and WanaMo.com.
- Aditya Sengupta - After graduating from IIT Bombay, Aditya straight went into co-founding Instamojo.
- Akash Gehani - With a dazzling MBA in Finance, before co-founding Instamojo, Akash was working as a product manager at ICICI Lombard.
How Did It Start?
All of it started when the owner of Instamojo, Sampad started a private video newsletter as a part of his own blog which was named InStartup.com. For this, he would travel to various cities to interview entrepreneurs about their journeys and startups there. Soon Sampad realized that this was an extremely difficult job and that he wasn’t getting paid.
Still, he was quite determined to set up a stellar payment system for his side project, followed by which he got a harsh reality check. This was when he started speaking to other similar service providers in the industry. And that’s when he realized that accepting payments was much more than just accepting payments through a portal.
It was followed by additional steps of setting up a website, then registering the company with the authorities, and then finally integrating with a payment gateway. “Doing so much for a side project didn't make sense then,” said Sampad.
This led him to abandon the project, which was followed by him moving into the founding team of DealsandYou where he worked on the mobile advertisements network for SMBs.
It so happened that in 2012, this DealsandYou idea did not fly as the co-founders had envisioned that it would. This gave Sampad, the opportunity to discuss the idea of his side project with the founders her, which actually came by accident.
“My idea was to enable people to collect money from their friends and families by creating a short link and sharing it with them. It was simple and a lot of interesting things could be done on top of it,” Sampad added.
So right at this moment, that a side project was fruited into a full-fledged business. Hence in September 2012, Sampad Swain along with his co-founders, Akash Gehani and Aditya Sengupta launched Instamojo.
Instamojo - Name, Tagline, and Logo
The word Instamojo ideally means “instant magic.” This was derived from Sampad's first project which was called Instartup.com. His supreme love for Harry Potter was the source of magic or mojo here which makes it Instamojo.
Instamojo - Startup Launch
Now, after the massive launch of Instamojo, the real entrepreneurial journey had just begun for the co-founders. While an effortless and easily mechanized payment gateway is a fantastic product for the startups, organizations and tech companies,
India is, however, a land of small businesses that are not very technical and also fairly resistant to new technological advancements. “Our eureka moment was when we realized that this could potentially be a game-changer for non-technical people who want to accept online payments without integration and website building,” said Sampad, one of the co-founders of Instamojo.
Instamojo Website
However, through all these milestones, Instamojo, since its inception has tried to build products and services that facilitate the organizations with a strong and flawless payment mechanism. Additionally, Instamojo also enables the MSMEs to build online stores, so that they can keep us with the digital age and the upcoming digital marketing trends.
Instamojo - Competitors
One might say that the Indian organizations are not that technically upbeat yet the competition is cut-throat in the market. Because with the digital advancements knocking the startup ecosystem one after another.
The fintech startups have time and time tried to revolutionize the payment mechanism and have always tried to take the level higher always. Instamojo competes with portals and payment gateway startups like Razorpay, CC avenue, PayU, Amazon Pay to only name a few.
Instamojo - Funding and Investors
Instamojo has raised a total of $8.4 million in funding over six rounds. Its latest fundraiser was in March 2020.
In January 2019, Instamojo raised $7 million through its Series B funding round. This round was led by Japanese investor AnyPay. Also, Gunosy Capital, Kalaari Capital, and Beenext, amongst other existing venture capitals also participated in the fundraising. Additionally, the Tokyo-based firm had earlier invested close to $4 million in the startup.
In November 2014, it had raised $2.6 million as part of its Series A funding from investors such as Kalaari Capital, Blume Ventures, 500 Startups, and others.
Instamojo - How to Set Up Insta Mojo Online Store?
To set up an Online store in InstaMojo, the steps you need to follow are:
- The first step is to sign in on InstaMojo and then check your dashboard.
- You will find an Online Store section on the left side, then you can create your store as per your wish.
- Click on the 'Store Details' in the dropdown you can edit the profile, add your store's logo, or link your social media pages.
Instamojo - How to Add Products on Instamojo Online Store?
To add products on Instamojo Online Store, one needs to follow some steps and those steps are:
The first step is to click on the 'Add Product'.
Then choose what kind of product you want to add to the store from the section. The section is divided into a physical products, digital products, event tickets and others. Choose from them.
- The next step is to add the title of your product.
- Provide a mini description of your product.
- Select the category of your product.
- Add the variant of your product that you are providing your customer with.
- In the advanced setting section, you have to add a Redirection URL, which will help your customers to make payments.
- In the advanced setting, you can also check the SEO options. Using the SEO elements will help you in ranking your online store higher on search engines.
Instamojo - Growth
Currently, Instamojo is providing payment gateway services to more than 3 lakh small-and-medium businesses.
Successfully developed a reputation for being fast and easy to use
Quite popular with the tech-savvy crowd.
To date, Instamojo has helped in creating more than 11,000 online stores.
Since Covid 19, Instamojo has witnessed a 25-30 per cent growth on its platform.
The platform is trusted by more than 20 lakh businesses in India
Instamojo - Future Plans
The founders and the team fairly claim that they are unaffected by the competition. Furthermore, the Instamojo is looking to build a platform to bring all its 700,000 registered MSMEs to a unified payment gateway platform. As of now, there are almost 3000 premium users and they are looking forward to increase the number to 30000 in a couple of years.
FAQ
What is Instamojo store?
Instamojo is a Bangalore-based company that is targeted at selling digital goods & collecting payments online.
Is Instamojo Indian?
Instamojo is an Indian on-demand payment and E-commerce platform for micro-entrepreneurs, startups, MSMEs, to start, manage, and grow their business online
Is Instamojo a payment gateway?
Yes, Instamojo is a free payment gateway.
