Bengaluru based startup, Refrens.com, has raised funding from a group of angel investors including Vijay Shekhar Sharma (founder of Paytm) and Anupam Mittal ( Founder of Shaadi.com). Launched in July 2019, Refrens.com offers a free invoicing, payments and expense management system. The platform is designed for B2B service providers including designers, software developers, accountants, marketers, consultants etc. The startup’s focus is on individual freelancers and small Businesses. The platform currently has 12000 businesses and freelancers using the system, that is currently growing at 10% every week.
The investment round also saw participation from Angelist’s The Collective fund, Mumbai based early stage fund Firstcheque, Amiya Pathak of Ezcred, Gireesh Subramaniam of Freshworks, Sujayath Ali and Naveneetha Krishnan – founders of Voonik.com, Amit Lakhotia of Park+, Ajeet Khurana – CEO of Zebpay, founders and senior management of Kaleyra, founders of DailyNinja, Springrole and few others.
Refrens’ founder Naman Sarawagi said, “Freelancers and soloists are the future of work. We are building an important platform to enable them to get payments faster and get more work. It’s really encouraging to have some of the most prominent entrepreneurs in the Indian startup ecosystem to put their trust on us for this endeavour.”
Kushal Bhagia, CEO of FirstCheque, an early stage fund that invested in this round, said “Freelancers and B2B service providers is a large and growing segment. There are about 15 million white collar professionals in this industry in India alone. There is a huge opportunity in building for this community of users.”
Kushal Added, “We have been tracking Refrens from day one and invested when they started showing early growth. The founders are experienced at building internet products of scale. We are excited to be partners in this.”
Refrens is founded by Naman Sarawagi and Mohit Jain. This is their second startup. Naman has been part of early stage teams at startups like Freecharge and ZipDial. Mohit Jain had earlier founded a school ERP startup and was CTO at FindYogi. He has been a tech consultant to multiple startups including DailyNinja and SuperProcure.