Expense management startup Fyle raises $1.1 mn in fresh round

Bengaluru-based expense management startup Fyle Technologies Pvt. Ltd has raised $1.1 million (Rs 7.26 crore) from investors including existing backers Pravega Ventures and Beenext in a fresh round, the company said in an email to TechCircle.

Software-as-a-service firm Freshworks also participated in the round through a strategic investment, the company announced in a press statement.

A company spokesperson told TechCircle that the startup is launching a few product features in early May, and some projects later this year, without elaborating on the specifics.

“The funding will help us expand the sales and marketing teams and also invest in research and development so we can serve our customers even better,” said Yashwanth Madhusudhan, chief executive and co-founder of Fyle, in a statement.

The funding comes more than one year after Fyle raised $400,000 (Rs. 2.67 crore then) in a seed round.

Girish Mathrubootham, chief executive of Freshworks, said in a press note that the company has “a solid team with a great product”.

Fyle
Fyle was founded by Sivaramakrishnan Narayanan and Yashwanth Madhusudan in February 2016. Both co-founders worked at Big Data company Qubole before launching the start-up.

Narayanan, a graduate from Ohio State University, has worked with EMC Greenplum, while Madhusudan, from Visvesvaraya Technological University, has worked at Manthan Systems and Capillary Technologies.

Fyle provides employees a single platform to file expenses through a plug-in that 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 no fraud or duplication.

Deals in the space
In December last year, Bengaluru-based Happay, an expense management platform for enterprises, raised $10 million (Rs 65.13 crore) in a Series B round led by existing investor Sequoia Capital.

SAIF Partners-backed and Sequoia Capital-backed personal finance management app Walnut Walnut received a seed investment of $7.9 million from SAIF Partners and Sequoia Capital in May 2015.

In June 2015, personal finance manager MoneyView raised $9.71 million in its Series B round of funding from existing investors Tiger Global, Ribbit Capital and Accel Partners India.