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An earned wage access (EWA) platform, Refyne has raised $82 million Series B from Tiger Global, along with the participation of QED Investors, partners of DST Global, Jigsaw VC, XYZ Capital, RTP Global and Digital Horizon. So far, Refyne has raised a total of $106 million in funding.
EWA enables employees to track and withdraw their real-time earned pay instantly, without disrupting payroll. Since EWA is not a loan, Refyne does not charge any interest or processing fees and relieves employees from the pressure of repayment.
The company has developed a proprietary Vendor Management System and Attendance Manage System that allows large enterprises to seamlessly scale EWA for their on-roll and off-roll employees.
This Series B funding will be used for Refyne’s product development, expansion of the team and to ramp up various business functions.
Chitresh Sharma, CEO and Co-founder Refyne told BusinessLine, “We are trying to scale Refyne not just in Tier 1 cities, which is usually the go-to place for most startups. We want to scale the company to tier 2 cities as well and we already are heavily dominating in cities like Raipur, Coorg, Bilaspur and many others.”
Founded by Sharma and Apoorv Kumar, Refyne has till now partnered with more than 150 organisations, catering to over 700,000 employees. The company aims to reach more than 3 million employees in 12 months.
Refyne reported an activation rate (percentage of user who activated EWA) of 67 per cent in the first quarter of its launch.
Benefits of EWA
Talking about the benefits of EWA for employers, Sharma noted that after enabling EWA, companies have improved their hiring by 2.6x and many companies have also reduced their attrition furthermore by 25 per cent.
In less than a year, Refyne claims that its transacting user base has grown 68x and the platform recorded 165x increase in the number of transactions over the period.
Alex Cook, Partner, Tiger Global, said, “We believe Refyne will be the preferred partner for large employers that want to offer Earned Wage Access. We are excited to support Chitresh, Apoorv and the Refyne team, as they work to improve financial wellness for the Indian workforce.”
Some of Refyne’s partner companies include Practo, TeamLease, CARS24, Tenon, Shadowfax, Rebel Foods, Acko, BlackBuck, Arti Group, Cafe Coffee Day, among several others.
A report on EWA and financial well-being in India by Ernst and Young, in partnership with Refyne, noted that 81 per cent employees face liquidity crunch between pay cycles. The report added that close to 60 per cent of employees would consider EWA as a deciding factor for their next job.
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