Expense Management Startup Fyle Raises $1.1 Mn From Freshworks And Others

Bengaluru-based expense management startup Fyle has raised $1.1 Mn in funding from existing investors, Pravega Ventures and Beenext. Girish Mathrubootham-led Freshworks, which has been a customer of Fyle across multiple countries, also participated in this funding round.

The startup will use the funding to expand its sales and marketing teams and also invest in R&D to serve customers even better.

Earlier in February 2017, Fyle raised $400K from Pravega and Beenext along with a clutch of investors including redBus cofounder Phaninder Sama, Zivame founder Richa Kar and Qubole co-founder Joydeep Sen Sarma

Expense management is a painful and frustrating experience for organisations. Founded in 2016 by Yashwanth Madhusudan and Sivaramakrishnan Narayanan, Fyle is aiming to automate and streamline this entire experience for businesses.

“The funding is further validation of the value we are creating for the businesses that are using us, and in our product. It helps finance and admin teams become compliant and reduces leakage, which they constantly worry about.,” said Yashwanth Madhusudhan, CEO and co-founder of Fyle.

Girish Mathrubootham, CEO of Freshworks, further shared that the investment was the result of what he saw as clear synergies between Fyle and what Freshworks itself was trying to do.

“Our products are designed and built as experiences that will make life easier for our customers. Fyle is attempting to do the same in expense management, and we also have been using them for a while. They have a solid team with a great product aimed at a market that can use some disruption. We are delighted to be investing in them,” he added.

Fyle’s customers include HeroFincorp, Investec, Capillarytech, Teach For India, RPG group and more. The startup has introduced several innovations in the field, including a first-of-its-kind data extraction engine that can identify and reproduce data from any kind of receipt with a single click.

Fyle also has integrations with Microsoft Outlook and GSuite, using which employees can file any expense with a single click without any kind of manual data entry.

Other startups in India’s expense management space include ItzCash-backed Finly, Gurugram-based Numberz.in and Bengaluru-based Happay.

Happay particularly has been doing well in this segment. With a funding of $10 Mn in December 2017, the company is now aggressively scaling its operations. In a recent email interaction with Inc42, a Happay spokesperson claimed that from a GTV of $60.5 Mn (INR 400 Cr), it has grown it over six times to more than INR $378 Mn (INR 2500 Cr) in the last few years. Also, it has seen an annual growth rate of 200%, fuelled by increasing customer growth and is well positioned to acquire over 10,000 small, medium and large enterprises by 2019.

Backed by Kae Capital and Khosla Impact, Numberz was also reported to seek more funds in July 2017.

While at the B2C end, the digital payments are seeing a boom in the Indian fintech industry, the B2B side is flourishing as well with technology easing out the day to day hurdles for the businesses. Amidst the rising competition, Fyle will definitely have to keep an eye on its competitors, while strategising its growth in the expense management space.