Portfolio Spotlight: Hishabee

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Hishabee is Bangladesh’s #1 platform for 7M under-banked mom-and-pop shops to digitise their business and connect to digital financial services. Hishabee works with over 300k businesses to access embedded finance and digitalise back office operations, helping these businesses save over 60 hours and $102 monthly.

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What problem does Hishabee solve? ‍

Hishabee is addressing the $2.8B financing gap faced by 7M unbanked mom-and-pop shops in Bangladesh. These small businesses are neglected by traditional banks due to the high appraisal and processing costs associated with processing small-ticket loans. As a result, these businesses lack instant access to working capital finance. Existing distributors/suppliers do not provide a line of credit from their balance sheet either, making credit access unreliable. With no other options, these businesses resort to loan sharks, paying up to 8x more interest.

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What products does Hishabee offer? 

Hishabee provides an instant line of credit from existing suppliers to the retailers, thus, these retailers can now stock products at zero upfront cost, sell and pay later while the financed invoices are immediately settled to the supplier by Hishabee.  Hishabee also provides a mobile first full-stack business management solutions for MSME businesses for record-keeping data and that digitally generate the creditworthiness of the businesses.

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What countries do you currently operate in? What is your market reach?

Hishabee are only operational in Bangladesh. For now, we have over 320,000 businesses, and from there, we’re able to generate around $250k of Annual Recurring Revenue and growing 15% Month over Month.

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What is the current market for Hishabee and what is the market potential?

The market is huge; when we look into the retail aspect, there are 7.8 million businesses. But then, these retail aspects are being served by distributors and wholesalers. There are a couple million more, plus service providers like laundries and salons–everybody; the small market segments combined, there are around 10 million businesses that have the potential to use our product.

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What is Hishabee’s revenue/business model? 

Entry: Our Entry to these businesses is through our free record-keeping app. This helps us credit score these businesses and helps us distribute our lending product at zero costs to active users via the app.
Retainer: The retainer is our embedded finance product, generating $204 per retailer annually.
Upsell: Option to upsell premium SaaS Services to these businesses. Premium subscribers get higher credit access, advanced app features and premium support. Generates $40 per retailer annually.

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What is Hishabee’s current traction to date?

We have over 320,000 businesses registered on our platform. We are currently doing $250,000 of annual recurring revenue and that’s doing 15%, month-on-month revenue and we have positive unit economics. Our recently introduced lending fintech product is showing exponential growth, doubling month over month. We have also secured one of the biggest banks in Bangladesh as a Banking partner aiming to bring 500,000 underbanked retailers with access to finance by 2030 bringing our annualised revenue to $100M.

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Where can our audience learn more about Hishabee?

You can visit our website at https://hishabee.io/ or email us at hello@hishabee.io.

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Disclaimer: The answers provided in this blog are up to date as of June 11, 2024.