Expense management startup Fyle raises fresh round of funding from Pravega Ventures, Beenext

The funding round also saw participation from Girish Mathrubootham's Freshworks

Bengaluru-based expense management startup Fyle announced a fresh round of $1.1 million funding from existing investors Pravega Ventures and Beenext. The round also saw a strategic investment from Girish Mathrubootham-led Freshworks, which has been a customer of Fyle across multiple countries.

Expense management is a tedious but necessary process for every company, and though there have been many attempts to solve this problem, it continues to be a painful and frustrating experience for any employee. This was the problem that Fyle sought to solve, and by helping automate and streamline the entire experience for businesses, they are well on their way to doing so.

Yashwanth Madhusudhan, CEO and co-founder of Fyle, said, “The funding is further validation of the value we are creating for the businesses that are using us, and in our product. Finance and Admin teams love the product as it helps them become compliant and reduces leakage, which they constantly worry about. The funding will help us expand the sales and marketing teams and also invest in Research and Development so we can serve our customers even better.”

Girish Mathrubootham, CEO of Freshworks, said 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.

Rohit Jain, founder, and Partner at Pravega Ventures said, "We have been believers from Day one in Yash and Siva's vision of creating a delightful product experience and reinventing the expense reimbursement use case. The strong adoption by employees in enterprise accounts is a testimonial to the fact that Fyle has been able to achieve this goal and has raised the bar for user experience in enterprise products. We are very hopeful that Fyle will be able to replicate this success as it expands to markets outside India."

Founded in 2016 by Yashwanth Madhusudan and Sivaramakrishnan Narayanan, Fyle's customers include HeroFincorp, Investec, Capillarytech, Teach For India, RPG group and more. The company 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.

Travel and expense management software have seen growth in many enterprises, as they provide faster, more efficient and flexible services.

Technavio forecasts the global travel and expense management software market to grow at a CAGR of 6.96 percent and 7.70 percent, respectively, during the period 2016-2020.

Quite a few players are riding this growth wave and offering their services; they include firms like Happay, Xpenditure and Certify among others.