The Hype Loop

Overview

The Hype Loop is building the “Airbnb for Digital Out-of-Home advertising” — a two-sided marketplace that lets advertisers book screen space across apartments, cafés and malls in minutes, while the owners of those screens monetise idle real estate through Hype Loop’s plug-and-play CMS. Founded in Chennai in 2024, the company is part of lvl1 Accelerator’s portfolio and now runs campaigns across more than 39,000 screens nationwide.

The challenge

Two-sided marketplaces are unusually hard to run financially, and The Hype Loop’s is no exception. Money moves in two directions at different speeds: advertisers pay per campaign through Razorpay, often with a short delay before settlement, while the company keeps a commission plus a smaller SaaS fee from publishers for the CMS. Add city-by-city sales and ops costs, and “how much cash do we actually have, and for how long” stopped being a question the founders could answer by eyeballing the bank balance.

• •Two blended revenue streams (commission + subscription) with different margins, tracked manually in spreadsheets that were out of date within a week.
• •Collections lag between a campaign closing and Razorpay settlement landing, which made the bank balance a lagging, not leading, indicator of cash health.
• •Burn spread across city teams, screen-owner payouts and product spend, with no single live view of net burn or runway.
• •Accelerator and investor updates assembled by hand before every check-in, pulling numbers from three different places.

How The Hype Loop uses Runway

The Hype Loop connected Razorpay during onboarding — a 10-minute setup that gave the founders a live read on bookings, commission revenue and settlement timing without a manual export.

A single live number for runway and burn

Instead of reconciling a spreadsheet before each leadership sync, the founders open Runway and see current cash, net burn and runway in months, recalculated automatically every time new transactions sync in. Because commission and SaaS revenue post separately, they can see which side of the marketplace is actually funding growth.

Cash checked from WhatsApp, not a dashboard login

The team uses Runway’s WhatsApp assistant for the day-to-day: a morning brief with revenue, burn and one action item, and a proactive alert if runway ever tightens past a set threshold — before it becomes a surprise in a board deck.

Answers, not just numbers

When a founder asks Runway “what happens to our runway if we add two more city teams,” or “which revenue line is actually profitable after payouts,” the AI assistant answers in plain English from the connected data, instead of someone rebuilding a model in a spreadsheet.

Always investor-ready

Because the numbers are always current, sharing an update with lvl1 Accelerator or a prospective investor is a one-click live data room instead of a week of prep — no stale PDF, no “let me get back to you with the latest number.”

The impact

The clearest example of the shift: because both revenue lines and burn sit in one view, the founders could see a run of unusually slow Razorpay settlements early — and hold off a new city launch by a few weeks rather than discovering the cash gap after committing to new hires. That is the kind of decision Runway is built to support: not a bigger dashboard, but a faster one.

What's next

As The Hype Loop adds more cities and, eventually, more payment rails beyond Razorpay, the plan is to keep every revenue stream flowing into the same live view — so the number the founders make decisions on, the number lvl1 Accelerator sees, and the number a future investor sees in the data room, are always the same number.