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OkCredit Launches #OutoftheShadows campaign; Appeals Women to Come out of Obscurity The campaign video highlights the story of an exemplary woman on the OkCredit platform New Delhi, 8th March 2021: In lieu of International Women’s Day, OkCredit launches the # Out of the Shadows campaign video, urging women to come out of the male pronounced guardianship. Launched under the theme ‘No more in his name’, the video calls for women to come out of obscurity and take credit for their accomplishments. Aimed at encouraging the inherent entrepreneurial spirit of women, the campaign video features the real-life story of Rashmi Apte - an exemplary woman on the OkCredit platform. Rashmi has built a business of homemade snacks, all on her own, and uses the OkCredit application to record credit transactions. During Diwali, Rashmi managed to sell 70-80 kg of savories per day from her home kitchen! Rashmi came out of the shadows- the shadow of a male member deciding the fate of women, be it business, career or ambitions. The company believes that every woman should, and that's why the campaign this year is an appeal to women to come out of this wardship. Sharing his thoughts on the campaign, Amit Nayak, Head, Growth and Marketing, OkCredit said, “Women are born entrepreneurs. Management comes naturally to them, given that they can handle multiple tasks at the same time. Technology could be the fuel to push this innate entrepreneurial energy to a more productive role in the society and economy. Conceptualized by OkCredit, # Out of the Shadows is our small effort to encourage women to build their own identity without the crutches of men in their life.” According to the Initiative for What Works to Advance Women and Girls in the Economy (IWWAGE) report, only seven in 100 enterprises in India are run by women. This is even though female entrepreneurship can potentially generate millions of jobs and pull more women into the employment stream. “As a startup working with millions of small entrepreneurs across India, we understand the importance of women being "Atma Nirbhar". We are committed to fostering women’s entrepreneurship through our suite of applications and in the process distribute fruits of digitisation evenly. Currently, about 15% of users on our platform are women and our goal is to grow this number multifold in the next few years”, said Harsh Pokharna, Co-founder and CEO, OkCredit. The company is playing an important role in correcting this skewed ratio by empowering entrepreneurs, irrespective of gender, through its digital business tools that help entrepreneurs to create an online storefront, manage staff digitally and make the book-keeping task simpler, digitized, and secure for small businesses. With easy-to-use technology that brings down barriers for women to start up, OkCredit has seen higher participation of women from small towns. The #OutoftheShadows video is available on OkCredit’s social network: https://youtu.be/K3X-GQFm2FM About OkCredit OkCredit is a part of the Ok network- an ecosystem of apps aimed at digitizing small and medium businesses (SMBs) across India. With technology that is simple and easy to access, OK is solving various pain points in everyday functioning of small business owners, be it tracking their accounts, managing staff at their set-up or the need to go online. Ok network’s first product- OkCredit was launched in 2017 by Harsh Pokharna, Gaurav Kumar and Aditya Prasad, all three of them being batchmates at IIT Kanpur. OkCredit has given a complete digital makeover to the traditional register book - ‘Bahi/Udhar Khata’ and made the daily bookkeeping task simpler and effective for millions of small businesses. The app not just helps small businesses keep track of credit transactions – both payments and receivables, it sends timely reminders, and also makes it easier for them to collect and settle balance amounts quickly. The app has seen more than 20 million downloads and can be accessed in more than 10 Indian languages. Currently, it has over 5 million active monthly users which include over 100 types of businesses like kirana store owners, mobile recharge shops, medical stores, apparels amongst others. The venture has raised $83 million from investors to date including from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Tiger Global, and Y Combinator.