Fyle helps employees file business and travel expenses with minimal effort

3CX, a global PBX company, had a manual expense management process, which was challenging at best. The company's finance team needed a better solution to minimise delays and errors in reimbursing their employees. The company then zeroed in on the Bengaluru-based expense management platform Fyle to do the job for it.

"Fyle has helped the finance department simplify and optimise employee expense management by reducing turnaround times and errors, and also mitigate fraud by ensuring all expenses were compliant with corporate policy," says Zina, bookkeeper & office administrator, 3CX.

Founded in February 2016 by Sivaramakrishnan Narayanan and Yashwanth Madhusudan, Fyle provides one-click expense tracking for employees, as well as control and compliance for enterprises.

With multi-currency and multi-organisation features, Fyle helps companies of all sizes automate and optimise their expense management processes.

Sivaramakrishnan Narayanan, left, and Yashwanth Madhusudan, co-founders of Fyle

Product concept

Fyle's software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based expense management, as it claims, enables employees to file for reimbursement of their business and travel expenses with minimal effort. The company’s machine learning (ML)-powered  technology extracts data from any kind of receipt, be it paper or electronic, with a single click, eliminating the need for any manual data entry.

"Most applications treat expense management as a workflow problem and depend on employee data entry. We treat this as a data problem. Our focus is to eliminate manual data entries. With a single click, we are able to extract fine-grained information from a receipt, which can further be used to generate critical insights to reduce spending,” says Madhusudan, CEO and co-founder of Fyle.

The company has come up with its unique integration with Gmail and Outlook which helps users create an expense entry without leaving their inbox or do any manual entry. "With our most recent launch of ‘Find My Receipts’, we have eliminated another step of expense reporting that is still done manually. Find My Receipts automatically finds all receipts from a user’s inbox, categorises them and submits them — without any manual intervention," says the co-founder.

Another aspect that differentiates is its ability to work with existing applications. "Large enterprises that have made investments in building out internal systems for expense tracking. These systems are anything but employee friendly. With Fyle, we can provide a superior employee experience and integrate with their legacy systems with minimal effort," he adds.

Opportunity 

The company claims the market for such an application is $5 billion globally and $750 million in India. Other prominent players in this space include Concur, Expensify and Abacus. Fyle has more than 50,000 users in nearly 50 countries.

On revenue model, the co-founder says: “We are a B2B SaaS company and we charge companies a fee based on active users every month. Active users are defined as those who have submitted one or more expense reports in that month."

"We are growing fast and investing in growth; we have been very capital efficient so far and that would not change. We will think about breaking even and profitability once we hit certain revenue goals," says Madhusudan.

Challenges

The company feels hiring the right talent in a competitive market as one of the key challenges. 

Fyle has raised three rounds of funding so far and plan to use the money raised recently to grow its sales, marketing and product teams.

Though the company did not disclose the money it had raised in February 2019, media reports stated that it scooped up Rs 30 crore in a round led by Tiger Global, in which Pravega Ventures and Beenext also participated.  

Pravega, Beenext and Freshworks founder Girish Mathrubootham had infused $1.1 million in Fyle in April last year. According to Crunchbase, Fyle has raised $5.7 million in funding.
 

Rijul Jain, Investments Team, Astarc Ventures

EXPERT TAKE

AI & ML provide Fyle with a great arena
 
Expense management is a necessary evil for organisations of all sizes. The core problem has been high inertia of manual data entry and a different sop for each organisation, which makes it difficult to offer a standardised product offering. But with consumers now getting used to world-class ui/ux designs, Fyle has managed to crack the problem by riding on automated data entry from email due to the high penetration of google apps/outlook for organisations and easy data entry via artificial intelligence/ machine learning layer on the smartphone -- camera interfaces.
 
This fundamentally solves the manual data entry problem and API push enabled them to integrate with organisations internal tools. Given organisations are now much more open to adopting employee friendly tools, this gave Fyle a great arena for large-scale adoption across organisations of all sizes.