One-stop solution for retailers changed game

Started in 2012, the Hyderabad-based company is a merchant-managed platform for all recharges, post paid bill payments, DTH services, bus ticket booking, hyper-local deals and domestic money transfer.

Kiran had always nurtured the idea of becoming an entrepreneur but after failing in his first two ventures, he went to work in IT company, learning the nitty-gritty of a successful business model.

Later, he started another technology firm, which didn’t take off. So, how did the idea of NumberMall come about? “I had gone to my native town in Prakasam district wherein I got the opportunity to run a small kirana store of my friend for a couple of hours. In those few hours, I observed that this store faced a real challenge of recharging mobile phones for which it had to maintain five to six phones causing inconvenience to the customers as well as the retailer. That’s when I sensed an opportunity and started NumberMall in 2012 as an all-in-one retailer platform for all recharges,” informed Kiran.

NumberMall is an app, which the retail merchant can download and it will act as a single wallet for all kinds of services mentioned above. The merchant needs to top-up their wallet with a certain amount and can use the amount to either recharge phones, pay post paid bill and DTH services, book bus tickets and others. The merchant earns a certain commission and the top-up amount will be returned to NumberMall each day.

In its first year of operations, NumberMall had made a turnover of Rs 37 crore and has grown to clock almost Rs 100 crore in 2014-15. It has about 15,000 merchants on board and has served 2.5 crore unique customers across 10 states in India.

The company had got an acquisition offer of Rs 120 crore, which it had duly rejected and in early 2015, it has successfully raised angel funding of Rs 5 crore from SRI Capital, run by Sashi Reddi and is also planning to raise Series A funding of Rs 60 crore in a few months.

The small merchant market according to Kiran is worth Rs 600 billion with 14 million merchants and most of them are not tech-savvy, so “we want to tech-enable small merchants and help them in increasing their business”, he adds.

“One of the constraints of this model is that there is not much acceptability among the public about the authenticity of this service from a local kirana store guy and thus, we are in the process of educating the public and as well as these merchants about the convenience of such a service,” Kiran says.

Going further, NumberMall wants to go pan-India by year-end and is aiming to get four lakh merchants on its platform in the next three years.