CRED To Acquire Corporate Expense Management Startup Happay At $180 Mn Valuation

Member-only fintech and ecommerce platform CRED is slated to acquire corporate expense management platform Happay. While the amount of the cash and stock deal is undisclosed, CRED’s acquisition of Happay will be at a valuation of $180 Mn, providing a lucrative exit to Happay investors.

Founded in 2012 by Anshul Rai and Varun Rathi, Happay is a business expense, payments and travel management platform. Serving 6K+ businesses, it claims to manage work-related expenses for over 1 Mn users globally. The company automates spend management workflow, making it easier for businesses to manage expenses, corporate cards and corporate travel booking in one platform. Building a strong proposition in a contactless, paperless fintech world, it ensures compliance and visibility with an end-to-end audit trail.

Happay also provides a software stack and an in-house payment engine, it will complement the card management experience for CRED members. While Happay will operate as an individual entity, all of the employees will also be rewarded under CRED’s ESOP schemes.

“With professional expenses forming a significant portion of credit card spending, bringing professional expense management into the CRED ecosystem is a natural extension of our proposition,” CRED founder Kunal Shah said in a statement.

CRED members will be able to manage personal expenses, while Happay’s acquisition will bring its credit card users under CRED’s umbrella.

Founded in 2018 by Shah, CRED offers premium credit card users rewards and benefits for paying credit card bills. It has also been eyeing a piece of ancillary services built around its primary ecosystem of credit card-centric services, majorly via acquisitions. For this, it had raised $251 Mn at a $4 Bn valuation, in October 2021.

In early 2020, it had launched Rent Pay, a service enabling users to pay their monthly rent through credit card. Later, it forayed into ecommerce with CRED Store, where consumers could buy products from Indian and international D2C brands and FMCG companies.

It also launched its digital payment that would convert CRED reward coins across ecommerce sites to shop and unlock discounts. Recently, it also ventured into peer-to-peer (P2P) lending with a community-driven product — CRED Mint. The startup stated that it would enable members to earn interest on idle money by lending to other high-trust members.

CRED has been trying to foray into the neobanking fintech business for quite some time now. For that, it has reportedly acquired liquor delivery startup HipBar, which owns a prepaid instrument (PPI) licence since 2016. Kunal Shah and brother Rohan Shah Naresh have also joined the HipBar Board, seeking to bring a digital wallet within CRED offerings.

Currently, the startup boasts over 7.5 Mn members, partnerships with 12+ credit card issuers (banks), and a recent $5 Mn investment in the debt recovery platform CredAvenue.