Exclusive: Sequoia-backed expense management platform Happay gets new investor

Happay, an expense management platform for enterprises, has secured $3 million (Rs 20.77 crore at the current exchange rate) in a fresh round of funding.

VA Tech Ventures Pvt. Ltd, which operates Happay, raised the aforementioned sum earlier this month from Greyhound Capital, show filings with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs. 

Greyhound Capital is a London-based growth equity investor which typically backs technology-enabled ventures.

Bengaluru-headquartered Happay’s post-money valuation stood at between $56 million and $60 million (Rs 389 crore and 417 crore), as per TechCircle estimates.

It could not be immediately ascertained whether the infusion was part of a larger funding round. Email queries sent to Greyhound Capital as well as Happay founder Anshul Rai and Varun Rathi did not elicit a response till the time of publishing this report.

Happay’s last-known round of funding took place in late-2017, when it raised Rs 1.60 crore ($250,000 then) from US-based Cupola Venture Opportunities LLP.

That same month, it secured $10 million (Rs 65.13 crore then) from existing investor Sequoia Capital, Singapore-based private equity fund Axiom Capital and AME Cloud Ventures, the venture fund led by Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang.

In July 2015, Happay had received $7.2 million from Sequoia Capital and Prime Venture Partners, according to data available with VCCEdge, the data and research platform of Mosaic Digital, which operates TechCircle.

Three months before that, 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

Happay was founded in 2012 by Indian Institute of Technology-Kharagpur alumni Rai and Rathi. The startup was incubated at TLabs, the technology startup incubator run by Times Internet Ltd.

Happay initially started out as a consumer-facing peer-to-peer mobile wallet, before subsequently pivoting to an expense management platform for enterprises. 

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, employee flexible benefits, international travel cards and a digital marketing expense card.

With the help of a single centralised platform, a company gets real-time visibility and control on expenses, while accountants can reconcile expense reports and can integrate the same into the accounting software.

Happay’s operational revenues nearly doubled to Rs 14.17 crore in 2017-18 from Rs 7.64 crore in the previous fiscal. Gross expenditure widened to Rs 31.61 crore from Rs 21.31 crore, while net losses jumped to Rs 16.20 crore from Rs 11.21 crore in 2016-17.

Recent deals in the segment

• May 2019: Expense management platform Fyle secured Rs 1.04 crore ($150,000) from investors including Ambrish Tyagi, principal scientist at Amazon Lab in San Francisco, and previous investor Freshworks Inc. (formerly Freshdesk).
• February 2019: Fyle raised Rs 30 crore ($4.2 million then) in a Series A funding round led by New York-based investment firm Tiger Global.