E-commerce is the mantra of the day and at least two new startups make it to the headlines in the news every day.
Happay is one such B2B startup that has revolutionized the manner in which businesses monitor and control the expenses incurred by their sales personnel.
Founded by IIT alumnus, Anshul Rai and Varun Rathi in 2012, Happay was launched as a consumer-based product skewed towards simplifying peer-to-peer payments, mobile & DTH recharge with a long term long-term objective of extending payment services for merchants at offline stores as well. By the end of 2013, the platform had more than 200,000 users, a majority comprising of college going students.
College students Anshul and Varun had always found the idea of cash / payment transfers to friends via NEFT, an irritant that set them to work on a solution that could ease the method of payments in the most seamless manner. The result – Happay!
After their graduation from IIT Kharagpur in 2010, both Anshul and Varun took to the corporate world with the former joining Microsoft and the latter, Tata Power. After a two year stint in their respective organizations, they quit the complacency of the corporate world and together, got onto the entrepreneur bandwagon to start Happay, (They started a P2P payments platforms & then pivoted to expense management software) an expense-management solution for businesses. It was a rough ride for both of them, in particular for Varun who got married the same year but they survived for two years without taking home the proverbial paychecks. Like most startups, the two entrepreneurs also had their phase of teething problems. They nearly conceded defeat but sheer grit and determination kept their hopes alive.
On one occasion, in the process of making a pitch, these young entrepreneurs were approached by a couple of business personnel who evinced interest in the usage of Happay in their organizations for ad hoc payments. This gave them an insight about the huge existing gap in commercial payments. According to the founders, ‘If you look at the payments landscape across the last few decades, there has been a lot of innovation in the mode of consumer payments but commercial and B2B payments have remained neglected n’t changed much’. Realization dawned soon and they very quickly shifted gears from B2C to B2B. An accidental discovery by all standards, today, Happay is rated as one of the fastest growing B2B Company.
Launched only 18 months ago, Happay has been successfully implemented across more than 1800 organizations. As the adage goes, the proof of the pudding is in the eating – the numerous emails, phone calls, messages & social media say it all. The current product takes care of all the expenses that any business incurs. It’s an end-to-end solution that which streamlines the whole workflow from expense reporting to reconciliation. It gives the management real time visibility & control over business spends.
Varun Rathi, COO & Co-founder of Happay says “We are working to emerge as a leader in this space. With a strong focus on product and customer insights in mind, our team has developed solutions over the past 2 years which can cater to all Business Spends including Employee Reimbursements, Petty Cash, International Travel, Digital and online Spends, Procurement, Employee Benefits, Salary and Vendor Payments. This enables Businesses to have a single platform for all teams and all payments, giving them the desired control and visibility and become compliant with IFC, Expense & Tax Audits."
Further he adds, “We’ve experienced a consistent increase in our client base which has led to an increase in the team strength as well. From a small team of 20 people in Sept 2015, our team has grown to 200. We take pride in the fact that we are the only Indian player in the market & our clients are from across 31 industries and over 165 locations, including SMEs and Large Enterprises."
First mover advantage“We started work on the product in the early part of 2012 & received seed funding of $500k from Prime Venture Partners by the end of 2013. This capital was used to validate our product-market fit and prepare ourselves for the growth phase and challenges. Our initial, product validation helped us in defining the product roadmap very clearly. Since then, we have received great feedback from customers who are using Happay and we keep striving to improve wherever we can. This year, we have crossed the Gross Transaction Value of 400 crore & we intend to double it up by FY 2017. We plan to invest another Rs 150 crore over the next 2.5 years and are optimistic of adding more than 10,000 SME’s to our portfolio by 2019.
Our product offering is suited to any business with a distributed network. We currently serve clients across 31 industry segments. Some of our clients include Aditya Birla Retail Ltd, Health & Glow, YourStory, Subway, Ayurvaid hospitals, Unnati NGO, IBIBO group, Uber, Grofers, Urban Ladder, Knowlarity Solutions, etc. We charge our customers an annual or quarterly license fee based on the number of users, just like every SaaS company.”
Happay is India's leading FinTech Company whose core vision is to help businesses manage their expenses in a ‘simple, fast & secure’ manner, the startup claims.
Scope of growthAs Anshul Rai, the CEO of the company puts it, "There’s absolutely no reason why a company, big or small shouldn’t adopt Happay. Happay is helping businesses break through the shackles of legacy expense management systems and embrace end-to-end automation by making the whole process cashless, paperless & mobile.
There are about 50 million SMEs in India and this speaks volumes about the huge untapped potential for a product like Happay. We have estimated business expense management in India to be a billion dollar market and this reflects the immense scope for our product.”
The road aheadCurrently 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 start of many more successes to come.
