CRED acquires Happay in cash and stock deal valuing the platform up to $180 million

CRED Founder & CEO Kunal Shah

CRED on December 1 said that it will acquire Happay in a cash and stock deal, valuing the corporate expense management platform up to $ 180 million.

This is the latest in a series of deals made by Kunal Shah-founded CRED, which started out as an app to make credit card repayments. The fintech platform is looking to expand its ambitions and grow inorganically using the large funding rounds it has raised over the years.

“With professional expenses forming a significant portion of credit card spends, bringing professional expense management into the CRED ecosystem is a natural extension of our proposition,” Shah said.

Adding that Happay’s “product strength, customer experience and vision align with our intent at CRED to reward responsible financial behaviour and we’re excited to partner them in their journey towards leading the category,” Shah said.

“We’ve invested in building a category-defining product at Happay with thousands of customers who love the experience. The next phase of our growth will come from building scale, brand, and distribution. The CRED team’s experience in this regard is unparalleled,” said Anshul Rai, co-founder and CEO of Happay.

Happay currently has more than 6,000 clients including Dominos, PriceWaterhouse Coopers and Oyo and processes transactions worth over $ 3 billion annually.

CRED earlier also acquired Chennai-based liquor purchase and delivery startup HipBar to foray into the wallets space. HipBar has a prepaid payment instrument license, in addition to acquiring a non-banking finance company (NBFC) license through an entity called NewTap technologies.

Moneycontrol on November 19 reported that CRED is in early-stage talks to acquire alternate investment platform Wint Wealth and restaurant discovery app Dineout