• Ravish Naresh founded successful startups like Housing.com and Khatabook, showcasing innovation in the Indian fintech scene.
• ⁠Khatabook quickly became popular, helping micro-merchants across India track transactions, reaching 95% of districts with over 20 million downloads.
• ⁠Ravish’s story emphasizes the importance of solving real-world problems, empowering millions of small vendors, and inspiring other entrepreneurs.

Ravish Naresh is the Co-founder of Khatabook, a platform that helps businesses at small and medium ranges to track their transactions securely and swiftly. After it was launched in 2019, it quickly became popular and in a short period, gained over 20 million downloads. For Naresh, it was not his first venture, as he also founded Housing.com, another successful startup that was merged with PropTiger in 2017 for around$75 million.

Ravish is a perfect example of innovation in the Indian fintech scene. He was born on February 11, 1990 in Bangalore. His story from being a student at IIT Bombay to becoming a successful entrepreneur is a story of perseverance and vision. He interned at Citibank and Deloitte before delving into entrepreneurship completely. He showed his interest in entrepreneurship from his early days in college where he dabbled In small ventures like Exambaba.com and Recharge123.com, which even if small were going to stage a foundation for his future growth. 

His first major break came in 2012 with housing.com. The idea was simple. This app will help potential buyers and people looking for homes to rent by connecting them with the owners and agents in that area based on different filters like area, no of rooms, and even type of furnishing. He started housing.com with eleven of his college friends and even after its merger in 2017, it is one of the major platforms in the genre with over 5 lakh listed properties in over 40 different cities across the entire India and different states. 

As his experience shows, he didn’t wait for long before starting a new venture, and this one was more ambitious than the last. The idea for Khatabook was born in 2016 when Ravish and his team were working on a project called Kyte.ai. kyle.ai was a digital spend managing app. It didn’t end up in the market, but Naresh made a crucial observation while working on it, that most of the small-town merchants and businesses still use old methods to manage their transactions. This led him to develop an insight into what he wanted to design and change the traditional methods of keeping the ledger in India. 

He started Khatabook in the year 2019. It was a Saas( Software as a service) company that aimed to help micro-merchants track their transactions properly. As of now, it is one of the fastest growing SaaS in India and this app which is available in over 12 languages is being used in almost 95% of districts of India with a customer reach of 150 million. Within some time, it grew to the extent that it was managing over 20,000 crore worth of transactions per month tracked among its 80 million merchant partners. 

What truly set apart Khata Book was its focus on simplicity and an easy-to-use platform that was accessible by the majority of small merchants in India. Most of these businesses that had never used digital tools found the way Khatabook worked fitting to their usage. 

What the story of Ravish Naresh shows is that identifying real-world problems and building solutions for them can also lead to significant success. Not only did he empower millions of small vendors across India but he also became an inspiration for entrepreneurs who want to solve real-world problems but don’t think of it as a possible outcome of entrepreneurship.

Read Now

---