Walk into almost any small shop in India - a caterer taking wedding orders, a distributor logging crates of soda, a hardware store tracking who still owes for last month's cement - and you will find the same tool running the whole operation. Not software. A notebook. A ruled register, filled in by hand, guarded like a vault. RecordBook, the Bengaluru startup that also answers to the name Rekord, looked at that notebook and saw the largest software category nobody had properly built for.
Founded in 2021 by Abhishek Choudhary and Robbin Singh, RecordBook is a no-code workspace that lets a small business build the exact system it needs - sales logs, inventory, collections, customer lists, approvals - from a phone, in a local language, without writing a line of code. The company went through Y Combinator's Winter 2022 batch and describes its ambition in a single line that doubles as its whole thesis: "Airtable for 400 million SMBs globally."
The problem is boring, which is exactly the point
The world's most popular no-code tools were designed for people who already love software - startup operators, marketers, product teams on laptops, comfortable in English. That describes a large market. It does not describe the shopkeeper. For that person, a spreadsheet is intimidating, a desktop app is out of reach, and English is a barrier before the first cell is filled.
RecordBook's insight was to invert the usual constraints. Start on a phone, because that is the only computer most of its users own. Work in local languages, because that is how the business actually thinks. And make the interface look less like enterprise software and more like the register it replaces - rows, columns, and a running tally you can trust.
What you can actually build with it
Under the hood, RecordBook is a flexible database dressed as a friendly table. It offers more than 30 column types - text, amounts, dates, dropdowns, attachments, formulas, status fields - so a single table can hold a photo of a delivery, the amount owed, and whether it has been paid. From one data source, users can flip between Table, Kanban, and List views, so the same inventory sheet becomes a fulfillment board without rebuilding anything.
The features that matter most to a small team are the unglamorous ones. Custom roles and permissions let an owner share data with staff without handing over a password - view, edit, approve, and export can each be granted separately. Custom home pages put the two or three tables a person uses every day one tap away. And a PDF export turns any table into the printed report a bank or a customer still expects.
Who's paying, and how much
RecordBook runs on a freemium subscription model, and the pricing tells you everything about the customer. Instead of enterprise seat licenses, the plans are priced like a consumer app - small, monthly, and payable from a phone. That is a deliberate answer to the oldest problem in SMB software: high churn and thin willingness to pay. Charge like an app, onboard like a messaging app, and the math starts to work.
Individual pricing (excl. 18% GST)
Business plans add teammate collaboration for teams running sales, inventory and approvals together.
Where it sits on the map
RecordBook's aspirational rival is Airtable, the well-funded no-code database that has never made a serious dent among small businesses in India. Its practical rivals are closer to home - the fintech ledger apps like Khatabook and OkCredit that digitized one specific thing, the cash a shop is owed. RecordBook's bet is that the ledger was only the wedge, and that everything else a business writes down - stock, staff, orders, deliveries - is a bigger prize.
Illustrative positioning by breadth of workflow captured, not market share. The competitor to beat is still a notebook.
The founders, and the fingerprints they left
Abhishek Choudhary, the CEO, is an IIT Kanpur alumnus who previously started a food business called Foodmonk - a detail that survives, hidden in plain sight, in RecordBook's Android package name: com.foodmonk.rekordapp. Robbin Singh, the CTO, earlier founded a social travel platform, Otraveli, and worked as a tech lead at Be U Salons. It is a small team, built lean on Google Cloud, and it shows in the product's discipline: fewer features, aimed squarely at people the rest of the industry treats as an afterthought.
That focus earned RecordBook a spot in Y Combinator's Winter 2022 batch - a cohort in which India was one of the largest contributors - and seed funding from YC, India Quotient and IQ Capital. The reported raise sits in the seven-figure range. The user count, past a million, suggests the harder thing to buy is already happening: people who have never used a spreadsheet are opening one every day and calling it their register.
The risk is the same one every SMB software company faces: small businesses are hard to reach, harder to retain, and slow to pay. The opportunity is that if you become the place a business keeps its records, you become very hard to leave. RecordBook is trying to be that place - not by convincing shopkeepers to think like software companies, but by making software finally think like a shopkeeper.