Innoviti’s GTV crosses $10 billion, ARR doubles to $18 million

Innoviti has announced that in the year 2020-21 its GTV has crossed $10 billion with net ARR doubling to $18 million. The company’s enterprise business, which provides solutions to leading enterprise merchants in food, lifestyle, healthcare and electronics categories strengthened its operating margins to 25% with the business now commanding a dominant 76% market share. The company’s revenue CAGR has accelerated from 54% to 74%, highest in the offline payments industry.

Innoviti had raised a Series C in 2020 to further its differentiated strategy of servicing the retail market through category and segment specific products. The company uses payment technology in unconventional ways to help businesses extract better value from transactions than anyone else.

The revenue increase has come on the back of several customers migrating to Innoviti’s digital technology as the pandemic brings fore the importance of quality digital solutions, beyond mere payment terminals and QR stickers. The launch of new services such as BNPL, EMI, and product-linked promotions for brands, has further helped businesses discover new and unique ways of attracting and retaining customers and enabled the launch of new products for smaller merchants.

Cost rationalization has been brought about through deep investments in setting up of a distributed support and supply chain structure. The company has setup warehouses pan-India, automated the supply chain, and put in place predictive detection of failures and support needs using advanced machine learning algorithms. This has not only resulted in a better customer experience, but also in gross margins crossing 70%, the highest in the industry.

The company launched GENIE, a marketing application for local mobile dealers to help them fight back with online by bringing to them the same technology as used by online merchants to attract consumers. This product not only supports conventional Brand EMI schemes, but also unique and exclusive EMI and cashback schemes not even available online. Launched initially in Mysore, the product gained market share, crossing 30% within six weeks of launch. Launched in April 2021 in Bangalore, the product gained 5% share within four weeks, before the lockdown prevented further roll-out.

In a statement, Rajeev Agrawal, CEO, Innoviti said, “Digitization provides an equal opportunity for every business, whether large or small, to access consumers. This has resulted in increased competition for all businesses. However, unequal access to digital technology for small businesses has increased competition for them disproportionately. Our aim is to level this playing field using payment technology as a channel to distribute digital services. The problem we are solving today for small merchants is one of access to consumers. They are facing stiff competition from modern trade and e-commerce. While the industry focus has been on providing loans to these merchants, we believe a much larger problem for them is sales. If they cannot liquidate their inventory, how will loans help them? Giving loans in such situations is likely to fuel defaults. The traditional approach to creating technology solutions for small businesses has been prescriptive, bundling lots of software into a terminal or computer that leaves the merchants flummoxed. We have taken an approach of designing tools usability that solve one problem at a time – today’s problem being getting more walk-ins and converting more walk-ins. In the next two years we are looking at further accelerating our growth by expanding the GTV to $ 30 billion, driving an ARR of $100 millin with operating profits expanding to 45%. The company is planning for an IPO in 2023-24, in the local stock markets.”

The company has plans to onboard 100,000 local mobile dealers in the next three months to capture more than 50% market share of this space which is struggling with the lack of quality sales growth tools. It is also launching short-term BNPL products in the Fashion and Food category to help consumers tide over the current economic challenges faced due to the pandemic.