India’s first Earned Wage Access (EWA) platform, Refyne, on January 12, 2022, announced the closing of its $82 million in new funding round, just seven months after securing its previous funding. Tiger Global led the round.
The Series B round also saw considerable investment coming in from existing international investors – QED Investors, partners of DST Global, Jigsaw VC, XYZ Capital, and RTP Global – and new investor Digital Horizon, the company said in a statement.
Refyne did not disclose how it was valued in the new round. The startup will utilize the proceeds from the latest capital infusion for product development, team expansion, and ramp up various business functions.
The startup aims to bolster the Indian workforce’s financial status
Refyne’s service is concentrated around on-demand access to pay any time. The company is building what is described popularly as an earned wages access platform.
The startup works with employers, typically with an employee base of more than 1000, to enable their workers to access their earned salaries in real-time.
The plug-and-play software ensures companies don’t have to change their existing HRMs or ERPs or their existing payroll process.
An employee with the partnered firm can log into Refyne and see how much they have earned in a week and withdraw a fraction of it anytime they wish.
Refyne automates the entire process, eliminating the need for any additional work from the company’s HR personnel.
The end-to-end process takes less than a minute and is available 24×7, 365 days, or the transaction is deemed free for the user.
The 60-second experience – starting from sign up, paperless processing and verification to the withdrawn salary hitting their bank account – allows employees to take control of their money.
Founded by Chitresh Sharma and Apoorv Kumar, the company has partnered with more than 150 organizations, catering to over 700,000 employees. It expects to reach more than 3 million employees in 12 months.
Demand for liquidity helped boost growth
Asia’s first comprehensive report on earned wage access (EWA) and financial well-being in India by Ernst and Young, in partnership with Refyne, noted that 81 percent of employees face liquidity crunch between pay cycles.
The report further stated that EWA could help the workforce bridge this gap and manage their monthly finances, resulting in positive relationships between employers and employees and improved productivity.
This is reiterated that close to 60 percent of employees said they would consider EWA as a deciding factor for their next job.
Meanwhile, Refyne’s co-founder and CEO Chitresh Sharma said the valuation had grown 6.5 times from the valuation during the Series A round.
Commenting on the latest fundraising, he said, “Refyne has been on a hyper-growth trajectory and the Series B will help scale our business to build financial inclusivity in the workplace and eliminate predatory lending.”
