A 27-year-old female entrepreneur is helping the small and medium-sized businesses and its employees with modern digital banking platform through her startup called Kite.
“The small and medium-size businesses up to 500-750 employees are typically facing a lot of issues such as loss of GST credit, financial mismanagement, leakages. The startup helps the small and midsize businesses with tech-based financial management,” said Priyanka Kanwar, Co-Founder and CEO of Kite.
The startup is an expense management platform where the businesses can control their employees’ spending, track their costs, hand out rewards and others.
It uses its technology packaged in smart corporate cards, giving accurate and real-time data on every transaction by any employee.
“We have created an alternative to traditional bank accounts for these MSMEs but in partnership with traditional banks,” she said.
The startup is in partnership with top 10 banks and electronic payment gateways such as Visa, Mastercard and RuPay.
The company has products and services such as Kite Tab, a corporate travel and expenses management along with corporate cards, Kite Grub, a meal card for employee benefits and Insurance services.
“In terms of pricing, we have different models for startups and businesses we try to charge as minimal as possible. We have a subscription fee charged monthly or annually. The pricing can range between Rs 1200 to 2000 as per user per annum depending on the services asked by the businesses on the platform,” said Kanwar.
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are at the core of Kite business.
“We have Machine Learning models on the back-end which keep getting trained. So they are being used in multiple ways. We are trying to automate the tasks that a human being should not be doing,” said Kanwar.
The AI is used in the company’s policies engine, helping flag expenses that stick out. The ML helps the OCR KiteBot, that scans the receipts and the input details, according to Kanwar.
“Right from the OCR technology picking out the data from the receipt to there being a bot in the background and checking every transaction for you. So the idea is all of this data actually translates into very exciting insights for the business,” she said.
Data privacy and storage
As the company is receiving a chunk of financial data on its platform, Kanwar said the company is very careful about its data privacy, and storage.
“We make sure that all of the data stored for this company is stored on a private cloud server to make sure everything is demarcated and anonymised. So all of the sensitive information we take care of very carefully. We are doing everything in the accordance of newly drafted data privacy guidelines,” she said.
The startup was founded in 2017 by Priyanka Kanwar and Prabhtej Singh Bhatia, who is also a Founder of craft brewery Simba.