Bizzo, a tech startup born during the COVID pandemic in 2021, on Thursday raised $2 million from a strong investor community led by ICICI Bank and Orios Venture Partners. The funding will enable Bizzo to further strengthen its vision of digitally empowering India’s SMB ecosystem.
Through this fresh funding, bijo The plan is to help service-entrepreneurs build, scale and organize their businesses digitally.
Vineet Toshniwal, CEO and Co-Founder, Bizzo, said, “We are delighted to include ICICI Bank and Oreos as investors in Bizzo’s vision to digitally empower India’s vast SMB ecosystem. For a long time, India’s small businesses were pushed towards aggregation. However, now the trend is to move towards de-aggregation and less reliance on centralized monolith platforms with closed systems. The next decade is all set to become isolated and open. It’s going to be about using architecture-based systems that provide autonomy to small and independent businesses.”
Toshniwal said, “Service businesses in India do not need middlemen, they need a medium, thus, BIZZO’s ultimate goal is to be a solution provider for SMB businesses to join the digital mainstream and enjoy the benefits of digitisation. This funding is the first step towards making our dream come true.”
Anoop Jain, Managing Partner, Oreos Venture Partners also spoke about the funding in Bizzo’s app and said, “At Oreos, we always support determined and visionary founders, especially those determined to be change-makers. Huh. Bizzo’s plan to empower the SMB services ecosystem is in line with our overall thesis of supporting ideas that use technology to disrupt traditional ecosystems, thus, benefiting all stakeholders. We are excited to partner with Bizzo on this mission.”
According to Bizzo, over the past decade, small and independent service businesses have lost their branding and pricing power, and have seen a decline in profit margins due to heavy commissions charged by aggregators. Furthermore, the Indian services sector is largely unorganized, with over 100 million small and independent service businesses in dire need of full-stack solutions to directly connect with their customers.
Bizzo intends to address these pain points by handing back the power to these service-entrepreneurs so that they can regain the relationship with their customer base and control all aspects of their business.
In a statement, Bizzo explained that its funding announcement is in line with several other developments in the market that continue to create a more conducive environment for technology-led innovation in open digital commerce. Chief among these is the Government of India’s Open Network of Digital Commerce (ONDC) initiative.
ONDC is an open architecture-based UPI-like platform for trading of goods and services. Major financial institutions like ICICI Bank, SBI and CSC are some of the investors in the platform.
Thus, Bizzo’s vision is in line with the overall market direction as it aims to develop a universal vendor-side app to facilitate digitization of services.