Indonesian financial wellness startup wagely bags $23M funding led by Capria Ventures

Indonesia-based fintech firm wagely—focused on financial wellness—secured $23 million in a mix of equity and debt funding.

Generative AI-focused venture capital firm Capria Ventures led the equity round with participation from existing investors. An unnamed private debt fund also contributed to the funding to expand wagely’s earned wage access (EWA) service in Indonesia and Bangladesh.

According to a statement, wagely enables workers in Indonesia and Bangladesh to manage their money by letting them access their pay after each workday. It offers the feature free of charge to employers and as an optional benefit to employees.

Financial wellness app wagely, co-founded by Tobias Fischer, Sasanadi Ruka, and Kevin Hausburg in 2020, also allows users to track their salary and access financial literacy resources to empower them to mitigate financial stress and achieve financial freedom.

As per wagely, about 75% of the 195 million workers in Indonesia and Bangladesh navigate financially challenging situations, relying on each paycheck to make ends meet. Lack of access to conventional financial services leaves a significant number of workers without the necessary financial tools and support to help improve their financial well-being.

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The fintech firm has disbursed over $25 million in salaries in 2023, processing close to one million transactions to over five lakh workers, it said in a statement on Monday.

Dave Richards, Managing Partner, Capria Ventures, said, “The wagely team has demonstrated excellent execution with impressive growth in providing a sustainable and win-win financial solution for underserved blue-collar workers and employers. We see a huge opportunity for wagely to apply Generative AI across multiple use cases, such as automated document processing and local language conversational interfaces for workers to make better financial decisions.”

In a recent interview with YourStory, Capria Ventures’s Will Poole said the venture fund is working with its portfolio companies to ensure AI integration to improve efficiencies and market size.

(The copy was updated to fix a spelling error.)