[Funding alert] Refyne raises $82M in Series B round led by Tiger Global

Bengaluru-headquartered earned wage access (EWA) solutions provider Refyne has announced raising $82 million in a Series B round of funding led by Tiger Global Management. Returning investors DST Global, Jigsaw VC, XYZ Capital and RTP Global also participated in the round. UK-headquartered venture capital firm Digital Horizon also joined the round as a new investor.

The announcement comes within months of Refyne’s $16 million Series A round which closed in June 2021. The company has seen a 6.5X jump in valuation from the previous round, though it declined to comment on the exact numbers. 

The current round takes the total equity capital raised by Refyne to nearly $106 million, within 10 months of being operational.

The company will utilise the fresh capital for product development, team expansion and to ramp up business functions, the company said in a statement. 

“Often the payday loan apps and other lenders do not disclose the multiple overheads such as processing fee, early payment fee or late payment fee etc. Often they allocate more money than necessary to the customers,” Chitresh Sharma, Co-founder and CEO of Refyne told YourStory. Since EWA is not a loan, Refyne does not charge interest or processing fees. 

He further added, “We let employees access part of their unpaid, accrued salary earned by them any time within 60 seconds. This solves liquidity issues for these employees and has improved the retention for the companies we work with by nearly 30 percent.”

The company, founded in 2020 by Chitresh and Apoorv Kumar, works on a Business-to-Business-to-Consumer model (B2B2C) where the service is offered by a company to its employees as part of payroll. It can be integrated with the company’s existing Human Resource Management System (HRMS) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) service. Refyne also offers a proprietary vendor management system and attendance management system for large enterprises to scale EWA for on-roll and off-roll employees. 

Refyne has partnered with companies like Practo, Cars24, Shadowfax, Rebel Foods, ACKO Insurance, BlackBuck, Cafe Coffee Day and others.

Refyne offers its services across 12 Indian languages to over seven lakh employees across 150 organisations. It plans on touching 30 lakh employees over the next year. 

Chitresh told YouStory that the company had applied for an NBFC license, while it currently worked with multiple NBFC partners to offer its services. “We will look at the data available with us and add products which will help people manage their personal finance better,” he added.

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The company targets individuals across categories though the product is more often used by people in the 5 lakh per annum earnings bracket. “A person who has a lower salary will probably use our solution four times a month while those in the higher salary brackets use it once in a quarter. The former are looking for liquidity, while the latter might need it for paying a one-time fee such as EMI, school fee, etc, having chalked out the majority of their salary into investment products,” said Chitresh.

The company claims to have seen its transacting user base grow by 68X in less than a year while the number of transactions over the period has increased by 165X. 

Globally, Revolut, the UK-based neobank which is setting up a presence in India, offers a similar EWA platform under the brand Payday. In the US markets, DailyPay offers earned income software, while challenger bank Branch, offers similar access.