Fyle Closes Series A Funding Round At $4.2 Mn From Tiger Global, Others

Bengaluru-based expense management startup Fyle has closed its Series A funding round with $4.2 Mn from Tiger Global and existing investors Pravega Ventures, Beenext, and Freshworks.

Inc42 had reported in February that Tiger Global and others invested $4.2 Mn (INR 29 Cr) in Fyle. Tiger Global via Internet Fund III Pte Ltd picked up 5,045 shares for INR 23.45 Cr ($3.29 Mn) against 22.5% stake in the company. Beenext and Pravega picked up 472 and 743 CCPS respectively for INR 2.1 Cr ($308K) and INR 3.5 Cr ($485K).

With this round Tiger Global had picked up 22.45% stake, other leading stakeholders in the company were Pravega with 11.35% stake, Beenext with a 7.23% stake and Freshworks with 2.48%.

Yashwanth Madhusudhan, CEO and cofounder of Fyle said that the fresh funds will help them expand the sales and marketing teams, especially in the U.S., and also invest in R&D.

Founded in 2016 by Yashwanth Madhusudan and Siva Narayanan, Fyle is an expense tracking platform for businesses. Its machine learning powered data extraction technology can extract data from any receipt automatically. This software is also integrated with GSuite, Outlook and mobile apps.

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.

More than 200 business in more than 20 countries with more than 100K users are actively using Fyle. Some of its customers include Edelweiss Tokio Insurance company, Freshworks, NinjaVan, Solar-Home and Sei-Innovation, part of Sumimoto Corp.

Scott Shleifer, partner, Tiger Global Management, said, “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.  We interviewed several Fyle customers who strongly believe their business processes have become more efficient and have seen positive changes in employee satisfaction and productivity. The company has grown rapidly and has many global customers who love the product.”

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. 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.

Expense management as a use case is applicable to practically every company in the world but has not experienced the scale of adoption that other horizontal SaaS softwares such as helpdesk software, CRM software, IT service management software etc. It is estimated to be a $5 Bn market by 2022, with the fastest growth in the small and medium enterprise and mid-market segment.

Update: March 29, 2019| 11:05 PM
Earlier version of the story wrongly stated that the company has raised $5.7 Mn, it has now been updated to $4.2 Mn. The error is deeply regretted.