Expense management startup Fyle raises $4.2 mn from Tiger Global, others

Bengaluru-based expense management startup Fyle Technologies Pvt. Ltd has raised Rs 30 crore ($4.2 million) in a Series A funding round led by New York hedge fund and venture-style investor Tiger Global.

Existing investors Pravega Ventures, Beenext and cloud-based business software firm Freshworks also put money in this round, according to Fyle’s filings with the Registrar of Companies (RoC).

Tiger Global, via Singapore-based investment affiliate Internet Fund V Pte Ltd, put in Rs 23.46 crore while Pravega and Beenext invested Rs 3.45 crore and Rs 2.2 crore, respectively.

The company issued a total of 6,260 Series A compulsorily convertible cumulative preference shares at Rs 46,499 each to raise the capital.

After this round, Tiger Global holds a 22.50% stake in the company. Pravega owns 11.35%, Beenext 7.23% and Freshworks 2.48%.

The development was first reported by news portal Entrackr, citing data research platform Paper.vc.

Fyle was founded by Sivaramakrishnan Narayanan and Yashwanth Madhusudan in February 2016. It 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 plug-in creates structured data from PDFs, emails and other documents. Fyle's algorithm also checks every transaction with company policy across the entire database to avoid fraud.

In the previous fundraising round in April 2018, the company had raised $1.1 million from Pravega Ventures and Beenext along with cloud-based business software firm Freshworks. Freshworks owns a 2.48% stake in the company. Fyle had raised $400,000 in a seed round in February 2017.

Growth plan

Fyle confirmed the fundraising on March 29 and said that, with this round, it has raised a total of $5.7 million so far.

The company will use the fresh funds for strengthening its sales and marketing teams, especially in the US, besides investing on its research and development initiatives, Yashwanth Madhusudhan, CEO and co-founder of Fyle, said in a statement.

Scott Shleifer, partner at Tiger Global, said in the statement that Fyle has grown rapidly and has many global customers who love the product. “We believe this decade will be shaped by companies who can transform business processes with new technology and provide a differentiated experience. Fyle helps its clients solve one of their most common pain points: expense management,” said Shleifer.

Fyle claims to have a client base of more than 200 businesses, including Edelweiss Tokio Insurance Company, NinjaVan, Solar-Home and Sei-Innovation, part of Sumitomo Corp.

Investors

Tiger Global is one of the most prolific venture capital investors in Indian companies with around 50 firms in its portfolio. It has backed unicorns including e-commerce major Flipkart, classifieds platform Quikr and ride-sharing firms Ola and Uber.

The investment firm has drastically slowed its pace of investments over the past couple of years as part of efforts to recoup at least a part of the $2.5 billion it has invested over a decade. Over the past year, Tiger Global has offloaded a significant chunk of its stake in Flipkart to Japanese conglomerate SoftBank and US retail giant Walmart, which in May last year agreed to acquire the Indian e-tailer for $16 billion.

Its other notable investments include e-tailer ShopClues, hostel chain Zostel, online grocer Grofers, logistics startup Delhivery, music app Saavn, news app InShorts, online tutoring platform Vedantu and deals app Little.

Beenext, a Singapore-based venture capital firm, backs early-stage technology companies in India, Southeast Asia and Japan since 2015. It has been investing out of its fund that has corpus of a little larger than $60 million. The VC firm has been one of the most prolific investors in India and a major chunk of the fund has been deployed in the country.

Pravega Ventures was founded in 2016 former SAIF Partners executives. The fund provides seed and pre-Series A stage capital to startups.

Freshworks was previously known as Freshdesk and was founded in October 2010 by Girish Mathrubootham and Shan Krishnasamy. In June 2017, Freshdesk rebranded itself as Freshworks as part of an initiative to position itself as a multi-product brand and for product clarity. Earlier, Freshdesk’s flagship product offering was also the name of the company.

Freshworks is one of the most significantly funded startups and considered as a poster boy in the Indian SaaS space. It joined the unicorn club of startups with a valuation of at least $1 billion when it raised $100 million in July 2018 from investors such as Accel, Sequoia Capital and CapitalG, the venture capital arm of tech giant Google’s parent firm Alphabet. 

*This article has been updated to add comments from Fyle.