Expense management startup Fyle Technologies raises $400K from Pravega, others

Expense management company Fyle Technologies has raised $400,000 (Rs. 2.67 crore) in its seed round led by early stage venture firm Pravega Ventures, the startup's founder Sivaramakrishnan Narayanan told Techcircle.

Venture fund Beenext, redBus co-founder Phanindra Sama, Zivame co-founder Richa Kar, and Qubole co-founder Joydeep Sen Sharma also participated in the round.

Fyle Technologies was founded by Sivaramakrishnan Narayanan and Yashwanth Madhusudan in February 2016. Both co-founders worked at big data company Qubole prior to starting up.

Narayanan, an alumnus from Ohio State has previously worked with EMC Greenplum, while Madhusudan, an alumnus of Visvesvaraya Technological University, worked at Manthan Systems and Capillary Technologies.

Fyle provides employees a single platform to file expenses through a plugin that automatically extracts and classifies data from bills inside emails and paper receipts. The plugin also creates structured data from PDFs, emails and other documents. Fyle's algorithm also checks every transaction with company policy across the entire database to ensure there is no fraud or duplicates.

The company is building as a set of APIs or microservices that can connect to the company's systems, such as travel service provider, CRM, ERP and accounting systems.

"Superior data extraction layer, cloud computing, advancement in AI/ML frameworks are helping companies to drastically reduce processing time, giving 100% accuracy (as compared to manual data entry). [The advancement in technology stack] also helps reduce frauds, improve compliance and increase employee satisfaction. In a country like India, this is even helps reduce costs by removing the need of frequent couriers of hard bills," said Mukul Singhal, partner at Pravega Ventures said.

Fyle claims to have more than 25 customers at present, and has ongoing pilots with large enterprises.

Pravega Ventures was founded in 2016 by Singhal and Rohit Jain, who were both formerly with Saif Partners. The fund provides seed and pre-series A stage capital to startups. The VC fund previously invested $15.6 million in a Series A round in Silicon Valley-based big data startup Innovaccer Inc.

Other startups that provide a platform to manage expenses include Gurgaon-based numberz.in, which raised $650,000 from investors Kae Capital and Khosla Impact in November last year.

In October 2015, Bangalore-based VA Tech Ventures Pvt Ltd, the company behind business expense management tool venture Happay, raised $500,000 (Rs 3.1 crore) from seed-stage VC firm AngelPrime.