Ambarish Gupta, cofounder and CEO of Knowlarity says:

"Happay is a wonderful expense management solution. We have been using it for managing employee reimbursements – it is easy to use, simple and makes our processes more streamlined. In the past, it would take at least 15-20 days for clearing reimbursements but with Happay, entire process now takes only 2-5 days."

Ashneer Grover, head of finance at Grofers says:

“The beauty of Happay is that I can dynamically control, how much money goes into every card. Earlier, each delivery executive had to go to his Area Manager to collect cash at regular intervals to make client purchases. I can also deactivate the card."

Ecommerce 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 I, 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 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.

How we pivoted from B2C to B2B

On one occasion, in the process of making a pitch, Anshul and I were approached by a couple of business personnel who showed interest in the usage of Happay in their organizations for ad hoc payments. That’s when we realized there was a huge existing gap in commercial payments. 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. Realization dawned soon and we very quickly shifted gears from B2C to B2B. An accidental discovery by all standards, and Happay is rated as one of the fastest growing B2B Company.

Our growth so far

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 and social media says 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 and control over business spends.

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 (an NGO), IBIBO group, Uber, Grofers, Urban Ladder, and Knowlarity Solutions. We charge our customers an annual or quarterly license fee based on the number of users, just like every SaaS company.

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 and tax audits.

Where we hope to go

We started work on the product in the early part of 2012 and received seed funding of 500,000 dollars 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 gross transaction value of 400 crores and we intend to double it by FY 2017. We plan to invest another 150 crores over the next two and a half years and are optimistic about adding more than 10,000 SMEs to our portfolio by 2019.