Exclusive: Expense management startup Happay raises additional funds

Bangalore-based Happay, an expense management platform for enterprises, has raised an additional Rs 1.60 crore ($250,000) in a fresh round of funding, a person privy to the development told TechCircle.

US-based Cupola Venture Opportunities LLP made the investment in December last year, the person added.

Happay raised this sum at the same valuation as its Series B round, which it secured in December last year. The startup raised $10 million (Rs 65.13 crore) in the round led by existing investor Sequoia Capital, VCCircle had reported.

The company had raised that round at a post-money valuation of $53-55 million.

Besides Sequoia Capital, Singapore-based private equity fund Axiom Capital and AME Cloud Ventures, the venture fund led by Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, and other investors had also participated in the round.

E-mail queries sent to Varun Rathi and Anshul Rai, co-founders of the venture, seeking more information about the funding, did not immediately elicit a response at the time of filing this report.

In July 2015, Happay had also raised $7.2 million from Sequoia Capital and Prime Venture Partners, according to data available with VCCEdge, the data and research platform of News Corp VCCircle.

In April 2015, it had raised $500,000 (Rs 3.1 crore) from seed-stage venture capital firm Prime Venture Partners, which was formerly known as AngelPrime.

Happay, operated by VA Tech Ventures, was founded in 2012 by IIT Kharagpur alumni Rai and Rathi. The company, which initially started off as a consumer-facing peer-to-peer mobile wallet, later pivoted to an expense management platform for enterprises. The company was incubated at TLabs, the tech startup incubator run by Times Internet Limited.

Using Happay’s prepaid business expense cards and its cloud platform, employees can add and update business expenses on the go, doing away with the need for cash and paper.

The company’s business expense management solutions include petty cash management, expense report automation, prepaid cards for business expenses, travel and expense management, international travel cards, and a digital marketing expense card.

Hence, on a single centralised platform, a company’s management has real-time visibility and control on expenses, while accountants can reconcile expense reports and can integrate the same into the accounting software.

For the financial year 2016-17, Happay saw a nearly three-fold rise in gross revenues at Rs 10.09 crore, up from Rs 3.47 crore in the previous financial year. Similarly, operational revenue grew seven-fold at Rs 7.64 crore, up from Rs 1.23 crore in the same year-ago period.

However, gross expenditure rose three-fold to Rs 21.31 crore, up from Rs 8.26 crore from the previous year due to higher employee benefit expenses. This contributed to nearly 65% of the total expenditure, which was clocked in at Rs 13.90 crore, up from Rs 4.84 crore in the previous year.

Losses widened a little over two-fold at Rs 11.21 crore, up from Rs 4.78 crore in the previous year