As per the global survey by Forrester Research, nearly 80% of the companies expect their employees to manually enter their expenses. This process is time consuming and is likely to lead to employee dissatisfaction. The report also indicates that travel and expenditure management is the most difficult of expense categories to control.
Bangalore-based payments services startup, happay is solving this problem by helping companies to quit the tedious process of managing expense claims by automation.
The startup has today announced that it has raised INR 3 Cr from AngelPrime, a seed-stage fund based in Bangalore. The funds will be utilized for product development, marketing and to expand technical and sales team. Recently, the company has also launched the happay Business Expense VISA card in partnership with Ratnakar Bank.
Happay is a business expense management solution that streamlines an organization’s expense workflow from end-to-end (expense reporting to accounting) and gives real-time visibility and control over business spending.
The happay solution sports several disruptive capabilities such as on/off control, channel-specific limits (eg. ATM, Online, POS), organizational hierarchy based rules and approvals, as well as direct integration into ERP software like Tally, SAP, Quickbooks and others.
However, all purchases done from happay Card are auto-captured on the happay platform. Employees can snap photos of receipts, record cash expenses and submit expense reports in minutes, on-the-go.
Founded in 2012 by IITians from Kharagpur, Anshul Rai and Varun Rathi, happay was part of TLabs accelerator.
Speaking on fundraising, Anshul Rai, CEO & Co-founder, happay said, “At happay, we are committed to bringing all business spends under one integrated platform – with a singular focus on customer delight. Working closely with AngelPrime has helped us with the capital and the advice to create a well thought out solution – one that has been very well received in the market.”
AngelPrime is a seed fund and incubator led by serial entrepreneurs Sanjay Swamy, Bala Parthasarathy, Shripati Acharya and Amit Somani. The fund is focused on building disruptive product companies out of India. AngelPrime partners have also incubated other exciting startups including ZipDial (acquired by Twitter), Ezetap, Smart Owner, Synup and HackerEarth.
Earlier this year, AngelPrime has also invested about INR 3 Cr in Nimble Wireless, a Chennai-based company specialising in internet of things sector. It is also planning to raise about $15 Mn this year to invest in firms working on mobile, cloud, IOT products and services.
Of late, there are many developments in mobile wallets space. Recently, mobile payment startup Momoe has raised $1.2 Mn (INR 7.4 crore) from investors led by IDG Ventures India and Jungle Ventures, with participation from India Quotient. Besides, ICICI Bank had also launched ‘Pocket’, a mobile wallet app for Android. Earlier in last year, payment solution service startup, Oxigen Services India Pvt Ltd, had launched a social mobile wallet service, Oxigen Wallet.
