Happay - Business Expense Management Solution

Q: Who are the founders of Happay?

Anshul Rai and Varun Rathi are the founders of Happay

Q: How much funding has Happay raised?

Happay has raised a total of $21.57 Million funding till date (Nov 2020). Its most recent funding was led by the Greyhound Capital for $3 Million in May 2019.

📄Company Profiles

Shubham Kumar

Nov 28, 2020 — 8 min read

Company Profile is an initiative by StartupTalky to publish verified information on different startups and organizations. The content in this post has been approved by the organization it is based on.

Managing expenses is crucial for the success of any business. However, keeping track of the expenses incurred is a cumbersome task. Bengaluru based startup Happay was founded in 2012, to take care of this very important yet complicated task. Happay is a business expense management solution that streamlines an organization’s expense workflow. It is an end-to-end solution that take cares of expense management to reporting and gives real-time visibility and control over business spending.

Happay - Company Highlights

Startup Name	Happay
Headquarter	Bangalore
Founder	Anshul Rai & Varun Rathi
Sector	Application Software
Founded	2012
Parent Organization	VA Tech Ventures Pvt Ltd.
Valuation	$53 Million - $55 Million (as of 2017)
Website	www.happay.in

Happay - About and How it works
Happay - Founders and Team
How was Happay Started
Happay - Business Model
Happay - Revenue Model
Happay - Funding and Investors
Happay - Name and Logo
Happay - Competitors
Happay - Revenue and Valuation
Happay - Growth
Happay - Future Plans
Happay - FAQs

Happay - About and How it works

Happay’s vision is making payments a happy experience for businesses and to develop a new product to support business expense management. Keeping in line with this vision, Happay has come up with a wide range of offerings. Happay's business expense management solution includes Travel & Expense Management, Expense Report Automation, Petty Cash Management and more.

Happay has also introduced a Digital Marketing Expense card. Designed to suit the monetary requirement of a digital marketing team, the card is designed to process, track, monitor and control the marketing spends, giving the organisation detailed financial summary of the expenses by the team. The features of the card include– detailed financial summary of spends on a real-time basis ensuring transparency; setting limits and policies on marketing expenses; monitoring spends on multiple platforms along with single-screen data analysis on the spend pattern. This card also enables organisations to fill the card with only a specific amount allocated for digital marketing and link it to all the online tools and different ad networks.

Happay simplifies things both for the employees and the organization. Happay’s prepaid business expense cards and its cloud platform lets employees add and update business expenses on the go, doing away with the need for cash and paper. Again, company’s management can get a real-time visibility and control on expenses through the Happay platform . Also accountants can reconcile expense reports and can integrate the same into the accounting software.

Happay aims to make expense management cashless, paperless and mobile by simplifying the entire expense management workflow from recording of expenses to accounting. It allows organizations to replace manual business expense management processes which are costly and cumbersome with VISA cards, that auto-record and classify expenses on mobile as well as automate expense reporting and approval.

Happay - Founders and Team

Anshul Rai and Varun Rathi are the founders of Happay.

Anshul Rai

Happay co-founder and CEO Anshul Rai is a computer science graduate from IIT Kharagpur. After engineering, he landed a well paid job with Microsoft Research Lab, a dream job for many. During his days at Microsoft Research Lab, he filed 2 patents and published 4 papers in international journals. But he always craved to do more and do something to create a positive impact, which led him to start Happay . A self confessed coding lover, Anshul is also a vivid reader who loves to read about entrepreneurs. Travelling and listening to music are something this entrepreneur loves to do.

Varun Rathi

Happay co-founder Varun Rathi is also a IIT Kharagpur graduate. Born in a business family, Varun is naturally inclined towards starting his own business. After graduation, Varun took up a job with TATA, but for the 'Marwari' within him, doing a job was too comfortable, which made Varun join hands with Anshul to start Happay.

Through Happay, Varun and Anshul are working toward making a whole payment platform that worked in real-time for companies. They began by working on employee payment customization and are expanding to try to become the one-stop shop for all of a company’s business expenses. Anshul focused more on tech aspects of the job, while Varun focused on sales, marketing, and the startup’s presence.

How was Happay Started

Remembering passwords while making online transactions was one hell of a task. The co-founders came up with an idea – to become the ‘PayPal of mobile numbers’ and to make peer-to-peer (P2P) payments a happy experience. And with this very simple idea, they started Happay – short for ‘Happy + Payments,’ the company’s core belief. The company was started with a simple idea: paying someone, be it friends, family or colleagues should be as easy as sending a text message.

With this in mind, the founders built their first consumer product, the Happay mobile app- a mobile wallet that allows you to pay just about anyone, anywhere, with their mobile number. No bank account details required.

However, even with a user base of over 2 lakh, the Happay team was unable to find a profitable revenue model. Besides, while operating in the B2C segment, the Happay team realized that there was a serious need for innovation in the B2B payment segment, which led the company to pivot to a business expense management solution. Today, Happay boasts of working with most of the leading corporates, helping them manage their business expenses minutely.

Happay - Business Model

Taking a general perspective, a consumer business is considered more lucrative in terms of ability to reach and scale, rather than a B2B model. The founders of Happay initially thought the same when they began conceptualizing the initial idea of P2P lending. The duo took a year to understand the existing payment mechanisms and the regulations which govern them, before getting their first product out in 2013.

Happay - Revenue Model

The revenue model of the consumer-facing business was not strong, the founders soon turned towards a B2B model, with the aim of helping businesses and corporates manage their expenses minutely. While loading the wallet, the company would have to choose close to 2% as payment gateway charges. So, the founders had to earn this 2% plus their profit margin from the merchants.

Happay - Funding and Investors

Happay has raised a total of $21.57 Million funding till date (Nov 2020). Its most recent funding was led by the Greyhound Capital for $3 Million in May 2019.

Happay Funding details:

Date	Stage	Amount	Investors
July, 2013	Seed	$20K
December, 2013	Seed	$500K	Prime Venture Partners
April, 2015	Seed	$500K	Prime Venture Partners
July, 2015	Sries A	$7.2 Million	Prime Venture Partners & Sequoia Capital
December, 2017	Series B	$10.1 Million	Sequoia Capital
February, 2018	Series B	$250K	Cupola Venture Opportunities LLP
May, 2019	Venture Round	$3 Million	Greyhound Capital

Happay - Competitors

In the finance management space, Happay competes with a growing number of start-ups including ItzCash-backed Finly, Bengaluru-headquartered Fyle Technologies, Gurugram-based Numberz.in, SAP Concur, Zoho Expense, and Expensify are the top competitors to Happay.

Happay - Name and Logo

Happay – short for ‘Happy + Payments,’ the company’s core belief

Happay Logo

Happay - Revenue and Valuation

Happay reported 6x growth in gross transaction value in FY17 and processed transactions worth $372.2 Mn (INR 2400 Cr) yearly. The company clocks more than 1 Million transactions per month, worth around $31 Mn (INR 200 Cr).

Post money valuation of Happay after the funding round in 2017, Happay was valued around $53 Million - $55 Million.

It reported a threefold increase in revenue in FY17 to $1.5 Mn (INR 10.09 Cr) from $538K (INR 3.47 Cr) in the FY16.

Happay - Growth

Happay is currently catering to more than 5,500 businesses across the country such as Aditya Birla Retail Ltd, Health & Glow, YourStory, Subway, Ayurveda hospitals, Unnati NGO, Ibibo group, Uber, Grofers, Urban Ladder, Knowlarity Solutions, etc. The company has a workforce of more than 350 employees. Happay is serving over 40+ business verticals and claims to have over $1 Billion Yearly Gross Transaction Value.

Happay is also voted amongst the top 3 Expense Players in India as per G2 Asia Ranking.

Happay - Future Plans

Currently the leader in 'card based expense management solutions' Happay aims to consistently maintain more than 50% of the market share. Constant innovations and client satisfaction have made Happay an indispensable product and this is only the beginning of a successful journey.

Happay - FAQs

What is Happay?

Happay is a business expense management solution that streamlines an organization’s expense workflow. It is an end-to-end solution that take cares of expense management to reporting and gives real-time visibility and control over business spending.

Who are the founders of Happay?