Instamojo - Aiding the Indian MSME's with Effortless Payment Gateways

Company Profile is an initiative by StartupTalky to publish verified information on different startups and organizations.

All of this time and generation is about making things easier, be it shopping or payment. Now, when you ought to make things easier for the consumer, it becomes imperative to make it easier for the service providers as well.

Following the same thought, Sampad Swain, Akash Gehani, and Aditya Sengupta co-founded Instamojo in September 2012. Instamojo is a payment gateway for MSMEs that allows them to accept all kinds of payments and transfers.

Instamojo - About and How It Works?
Instamojo - Shareholding
Instamojo - Pricing
Instamojo - Target Market Size
Instamojo - Founders and Team
Instamojo - How did it start?
Instamojo - Name, Tagline, and Logo
Instamojo - Startup Launch
Instamojo - Competitors
Instamojo - Funding and Investors
Instamojo - How to Set Up Insta Mojo Online Store?
Instamojo - How to Add Products on Instamojo Online Store?
Instamojo - Growth
Instamojo - Product And Service
Instamojo - Partnership
Instamojo - Acquistion
Instamojo - Campaign
Instamojo - Future Plans

Instamojo - About and How It Works?

Back when it was incepted in 2012, Instamojo started as a solution provider of digital payments, which has now progressively grown into a robust online payment gateway for enterprises like micro, small, and medium. So that they start, manage, and grow their businesses online.

All in all, like most fintech startups in the country, Instamojo has turned into a full-stack digital services platform over time with the sole vision of constructively bridging the gap between MSMEs business, who find it hard to leverage and optimally use the right technology and developers in reaching out to the relevant application users.

Instamojo has two flagship products:

MojoCapital

This product from Instamojo helps disperse bite-sized short-term credit loans, which are worth around $2 million. MojoCapital caters primarily to its merchants on a monthly basis, and it has shown a projected growth of 25% on a monthly basis.

MojoXpress

MojoXpress is often regarded as the logistics arm of Instamojo and helps MSMEs deliver their products to their respective customers. Not very surprisingly, it is touching close to 1,000 shipments per month.

Instamojo - Pricing

In Instagram, you can also create your free online store, where you can make changes to add products and customize your store. The online store builder has an inbuilt payment gateway where merchants can sell and manage their online store.

Pricing details for the Instamojo store

Instamojo - Target Market Size

“Today, the MSME sector in India contributes to 37 percent of the country’s GDP and employs over 117 million people. The scope of growth for this sector is enormous; however, the presence of several challenges, especially the lack of knowledge on several business-specific elements, prevents this.

A major roadblock we identified was that several MSMEs did not know where to source information. Through the mojoVersity platform, we aim to democratize knowledge transfer by making available course content that will help small business owners learn and be more aware of the nuances required to run and sustain a business," said Sampad Swain, the founder of Instamojo.

Instamojo - Founders and Team

The founders of Instamojo are Sampad Swain, Akash Gehani, and Aditya Sengupta.

• Sampad Swain: Since graduating from IBS Hyderabad, Swain has had his hands on quite a few startups. Before Instamojo, he co-founded DealsandYou and WanaMo.com.
• Aditya Sengupta: After graduating from IIT Bombay, Aditya went straight into co-founding Instamojo.
• Akash Gehani: With a dazzling MBA in finance, before co-founding Instamojo, Akash was working as a product manager at ICICI Lombard.

Instamojo - How did it start?

All of it started when the owner of Instamojo, Sampad, started a private video newsletter as a part of his own blog, which was named InStartup.com. For this, he would travel to various cities to interview entrepreneurs about their journeys and startups there. Soon, Sampad realized that this was an extremely difficult job and that he wasn’t getting paid.

Still, he was quite determined to set up a stellar payment system for his side project, followed by a harsh reality check. This was when he started speaking to other similar service providers in the industry. And that’s when he realized that accepting payments was much more than just accepting payments through a portal.

It was followed by additional steps of setting up a website, then registering the company with the authorities, and then finally integrating with a payment gateway. “Doing so much for a side project didn't make sense then,” said Sampad.

This led him to abandon the project, which was followed by his moving into the founding team of DealsandYou, where he worked on the mobile advertising network for SMBs.

It so happened that in 2012, this DealsandYou idea did not fly as the co-founders had envisioned that it would. This gave Sampad the opportunity to discuss the idea of his side project with the founders here, which actually came by accident.

“My idea was to enable people to collect money from their friends and families by creating a short link and sharing it with them. It was simple and a lot of interesting things could be done on top of it,”  Sampad added.

So right at this moment, a side project has blossomed into a full-fledged business. Hence, in September 2012, Sampad Swain, along with his co-founders, Akash Gehani and Aditya Sengupta, launched Instamojo.

Instamojo - Name, Tagline, and Logo

The word Instamojo ideally means “instant magic.” This was derived from Sampad's first project, which was called Instartup.com. His supreme love for Harry Potter was the source of magic, or mojo here, which makes it Instamojo.

Instamojo - Shareholding

Instamojo - Startup Launch

Now, after the massive launch of Instamojo, the real entrepreneurial journey has just begun for the co-founders. While an effortless and easily mechanized payment gateway is a fantastic product for startups, organizations and tech companies,

India is, however, a land of small businesses that are not very technical and are also fairly resistant to new technological advancements. “Our eureka moment was when we realized that this could potentially be a game-changer for non-technical people who want to accept online payments without integration and website building,” said Sampad, one of the co-founders of Instamojo.

However, through all these milestones, Instamojo, since its inception, has tried to build products and services that facilitate organizations with a strong and flawless payment mechanism. Additionally, Instamojo also enables MSMEs to build online stores so that they can keep up with the digital age and the upcoming digital marketing trends.

Instamojo - Competitors

One might say that the Indian organizations are not that technically upbeat, yet the competition is cutthroat in the market. Because digital advancements are knocking on the startup ecosystem one after another.

The fintech startups have time and time again tried to revolutionize the payment mechanism and have always tried to take the level higher. Instamojo competes with portals and payment gateway startups like Razorpay, CC Avenue, PayU, and Amazon Pay, to name a few.

Instamojo - Funding and Investors

Instamojo has raised a total of $8.4 million in funding over 8 rounds.

Instamojo - How to Set Up Insta Mojo Online Store?

To set up an online store in InstaMojo, the steps you need to follow are:

• The first step is to sign in on InstaMojo and then check your dashboard.
• You will find an Online Store section on the left side, and then you can create your store as per your wish.
• By clicking on 'Store Details' in the dropdown, you can edit your profile, add your store's logo, or link to your social media pages.

Instamojo - How to Add Products on Instamojo Online Store?

To add products to the Instamojo Online Store, one needs to follow some steps, and those steps are:

• The first step is to click on 'Add Product'.
• Then choose what kind of product you want to add to the store from the section. The section is divided into physical products, digital products, event tickets, and others. Choose from them.
• The next step is to add the title of your product.
• Provide a brief description of your product.
• Select the category for your product.
• Add the variant of your product that you are providing your customer with.
• In the advanced settings section, you have to add a redirection URL, which will help your customers make payments.
• In the advanced setting, you can also check the SEO options. Using the SEO elements will help you in ranking your online store higher on search engines.

Instamojo - Growth

• Currently, Instamojo is providing payment gateway services to more than 3 lakh small and medium businesses.
• Successfully developed a reputation for being fast and easy to use
• Quite popular with the tech-savvy crowd.
• To date, Instamojo has helped create more than 11,000 online stores.
• Since COVID 19, Instamojo has witnessed 25–30 percent growth on its platform.
• The platform is trusted by more than 20 lakh businesses in India

Instamojo - Product And Service

MojoXpress and Mojo Capital

MojoXpress and MojoCapital, two new flagship products from Instamojo, were introduced in August 2018. The company will establish itself as a complete stack service provider for the MSME (Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprise) sector with the new solutions, which will cater to the loan and logistics needs of small enterprises.

SAAS Solution

With the acquisition of GetMeAShop, Instamojo has advanced its strategy to become a full-stack service provider for MSMEs on February 5, 2020.

E-commerce Software Platform

On June 8, 2021, a platform for e-commerce was introduced with the goal of assisting small to medium-sized consumer brands in establishing an online presence.

Instamojo - Partnership

Nova Registry

Instamojo and one of the most creative registry operators in the world, Nova Registry, have partnered up on June 21, 2023, to establish.link as the industry standard for companies that need to share links that their clients can rely on.

Instamojo - Acquistion

Instamojo has two companies to date:

• Showman was acquired by Instamojo on April 22, 2021, for an indisclosed amount.
• Get Me A Shop was acquired by Instamojo on February 5, 2020, for an amount of $5 million.

Instamojo - Campaign

Mojo Stars

"Mojo Stars" is the name of Instamojo's debut digital marketing initiative. According to a statement, the brand hopes to tenfold expand its exposure with this campaign. The six-month campaign aims to introduce Instamojo to prospective entrepreneurs by running on Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram. The brand also wants to encourage aspiring business owners by spreading the idea that "If they can do it, so can you."

Instamojo - Future Plans

The founders and the team fairly claim that they are unaffected by the competition. Furthermore, Instamojo is looking to build a platform to bring all its 700,000 registered MSMEs to a unified payment gateway platform. Instamojo has almost 3000 premium users, and they are looking forward to increasing the number to 30000 in a couple of years.

FAQ

What is the Instamojo store?

Instamojo is a Bangalore-based company that is targeted at selling digital goods and collecting payments online.

Is Instamojo Indian?

Instamojo is an Indian on-demand payment and e-commerce platform for micro-entrepreneurs, startups, and MSMEs to start, manage, and grow their businesses online.

Is Instamojo a payment gateway?

Yes, Instamojo is a free payment gateway.