Bangalore-based Happay, an expense management platform for enterprises, has raised $10 million (Rs 65.13 crore) in a Series B funding round led by existing investor Sequoia Capital, a person directly in the know told VCCircle.
While Sequoia put in nearly Rs 38.5 crore ($5.98 million), Singapore-based private equity fund Axiom Capital invested Rs 25.74 crore ($4 million). AME Cloud Ventures, the venture fund led by Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, among others, also participated in the round, the person mentioned above added.
With this investment, the startup has been valued between $53 million and $55 million, post-money.
Happay had last raised $7.2 million in July 2015 from Sequoia Capital and Prime Venture Partners, according to data available with VCCEdge, the data and research platform of VCCircle.
In April 2015, it had also raised $500,000 (Rs 3.1 crore) from Prime Venture Partners.
While Sequoia Capital has around 32.4% stake in Happay, founders Varun Rathi and Anshul Rai hold about 30% stake, Prime Venture Partners has about 26% stake in the firm, and the rest is owned by Axiom Capital, Times Internet Ltd, and others.
Rathi and Rai did not immediately respond to email queries from VCCircle, seeking comment.
Founded in 2006, Axiom Capital focuses on investments in the Asia Pacific region, managing four private equity funds-of-funds with total commitments of over $3.5 billion, according to information available on its website.
AME Cloud Ventures focuses on seed and late-stage companies building infrastructure and value chains around data.
Happay, operated by VA Tech Ventures, was founded in 2012 by IIT Kharagpur alumni Rai and Rathi. The company, which initially started off as a consumer-facing peer-to-peer mobile wallet later pivoted to an expense management platform for enterprises. The company was incubated at TLabs, the tech startup incubator run by Times Internet Limited.
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, international travel card, and a digital marketing expense card.
Hence, on a single centralised platform, a company’s management has real-time visibility and control on expenses, while accountants can reconcile expense reports and can integrate the same into the accounting software.
For the financial year 2016-17, Happay saw a nearly three-fold rise in gross revenues at Rs 10.09 crore, up from Rs 3.47 crore in the previous financial year. Similarly, operational revenue grew seven-fold at Rs 7.64 crore, up from Rs 1.23 crore in the same year-ago period.
However, gross expenditure rose three-fold to Rs 21.31 crore, up from Rs 8.26 crore from the previous year due to higher employee benefit expenses. This contributed to nearly 65% of the total expenditure, which was clocked in at Rs 13.90 crore, up from Rs 4.84 crore in the previous year.
Losses widened a little over two-fold at Rs 11.21 crore, up from Rs 4.78 crore in the previous year.