Instamojo Success story | Inspiring Indian startup stories.
What makes someone an entrepreneur? The term entrepreneur seems to be thrown around everywhere for everyone doing anything. They pop up in all types of industries and can have widely different backgrounds. A few build personal brands, while others work tirelessly on a physical product that they believe in. On the whole, an idea with the right tools helps to develop it is needed to function as a business. Such a kind of idea budded into the minds of Harshad Sharma, Sampad Swain, Aditya Sengupta, and Akash Gehani created Instamojo in 2012. Being a Bangalore-based company it targets digital payment gateway and e-commerce store company. Sampad Swain is the current CEO of Instamojo as the founder Harshad Sharma is no longer with the company. The Instamojo, meant “instant magic”, which was derived from Sampad’s first project Instartup.com His affection towards Harry Potter was the source of magic or mojo here.
Earlier Sampad worked with companies like ITC and Godrej he also started working on his side project InStartup.com a platform where he interviewed various entrepreneurs and blogged about it. As time passed he faced adversity as he was not getting the expected payment for the job is done. To keep himself motivated to do more, he decided to accept contributions from peoples but accepting the payments required setting up a website, registering the company, and integrating with a payment gateway where he thought was too much for a side business and abandoned it.
He moved into the founding team of DealsandYou, to work on the mobile ads network for SMBs he also discussed his side project with the co-founders of DealsandYou which flashed a green signal. Sampad along with the founders of DealsandYou founded Instamojo, a payment platform for MSMEs to accept all kinds of payments and transfers.
As all the companies vary according to their funding, Instamojo almost shut down in 2017 as it faced its fair share of problems. It was approved that it had last raised money in 2014 and was supposed to raise more in 2016 where they failed to do so.
Instamojo received funding from Japanese payments firm AnyPay in August 2017. The company had defeated its close call with the end and had revived. They are now planning to extend their reach and add many more features to their booming business. They had gone through 6 rounds of fundings and had raised 8.4 million dollars. Some of the core investors of Instamojo are Kalaari Capital, Times Internet, and AnyPay.
The latest investment of Instamojo has been 5 million USD. They acquired Get Me A Shop which is a platform that enables sellers to set up an online store in February 2020.
