MSMEs are the backbone of the Indian economy and having cash to grow is critical for their survival. According to India Brand Equity Foundation (IBEF), India is home to about 6.3 crore MSMEs, which contribute around 29 percent to the country’s overall GDP. Also, the sector is producing several employment opportunities in tier 2 and tier 3 sectors. To assist the MSME sector here are 5 start-ups that are solving day to day requirements of small and medium-sized businesses.

Aye Finance: Aye Finance is a commercial institution built around the mission to solve the challenges of funding MSMEs and enabling their inclusion into the mainstream of the economy. Aye Finance differentiates itself by creating a technically enabled process that builds credit insights through a variety of available business and behavioural data. This effective credit appraisal coupled with the use of modern workflow automation, and a small but engaged workforce is helping bridge the gap between the MSMEs and organized lending. The cloud-computing architecture enables flexible delivery of customer service at an affordable cost. The Company also funds its non-profit initiative to coach MSMEs on market knowledge, business book-keeping, and advising on operations techniques.

Treflo: Treflo is a mobile-friendly SaaS platform aimed at being a productivity suite configured exclusively for Indian SMBs. Treflo’s powerful middleware integrates itself into the workflow of businesses by making compliance obligations up to 100 times more efficient. Automated GST billing and payments, one-click compliance, staff management, customer and cash flow management, and growth insights are some of the salient features that establish Treflo as the go-to app for SMBs. The resourceful platform acts as an equalizer to create sectoral parity, offering tools to SMBs that only large enterprises have used hitherto.

Clear: Clear (formerly ClearTax), India’s largest fintech SaaS company, has launched an Invoice Discounting product for Enterprises, marking its foray into SME credit and B2B payments. The Invoice Discounting product will be available to Clear’s existing 3,000-plus enterprise customers to provide working capital solutions to their suppliers and help grow their businesses. Clear’s Invoice Discounting product has been designed to deliver instant working capital and liquidity to suppliers and is expected to process $3B by the end of FY24. The smart AI/ML-based platform will connect to ERPs and enable a discount rate selection that is acceptable to both customers and their suppliers. The enterprises can choose from a range of financing options to fund their early payments: they can use their own surplus cash, opt for a line of credit via banks, or go through the TReDs marketplaces from within Clear’s platform.

QPe: QPe is the destination for transforming brick and mortar businesses into digital stores & empower them to manage orders, payments, deliveries & marketing/Promotion suite by simply automating businesses. Envisioning the digital transformation of every business (from small shops to SMEs and MSMEs), QPe has set its goal to empower them by eliminating the monopoly of aggregators in terms of hefty commissions and no data control through tech solutions. Merchants/Businesses can manage stores, do follow-ups, send SMS/Emails/Abandoned Cart Recovery Reminders, Offers/discount codes to existing as well as new customers, can get rating/reviews on their products from customers, can analyze the traffic, customer behavior/orders data on the store through Facebook pixel and other tools can manage/automate their entire social media marketing from a single dashboard. Moreover, the merchants and businesses can sell hyperlocal, Pan India, or globally by enabling International Payment Options to exchange in any currency and deliver through delivery partners.

Easebuzz: Easebuzz is India’s Leading “Digital Collections Platform” with more than 60,000 businesses accepting payments, sending payouts, enabling capital loans, and managing their online business with ease. Easebuzz provides solutions to manage end-to-end payment collections for businesses and Simple and easy-to-use payment APIs to manage payment acceptance and disbursements. The company also offers security as per PCI DSS norms and is compliant with data security standards and bookkeeping solutions. Easebuzz also offers Plug-n-play product APIs to manage recurring payment collections.