GajiGesa, an employee management and wellness platform offering Earned Wage Access (EWA) and other financial services in Indonesia, has raised an oversubscribed US$6.6 million pre-Series A funding round.
MassMutual Ventures, the corporate VC arm of Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company, led the latest round.
Wagestream, January Capital, Bunda Group, and Smile Group, and existing investors defy.vc, Quest Ventures, GK Plug and Play, and Next Billion Ventures, co-invested.
Individuals, including Oliver Jung, Northstar Group partner Patrick Walujo, Ula CEO Nipun Mehra, and Stripe APAC head Noah Pepper, also joined.
After doubling its headcount to over fifty, GajiGesa intends to utilise the fresh funds for product development, scaling the business across Indonesia, and expansion into other Southeast Asian markets.
Also Read: Former Carro COO’s financial wellness app GajiGesa bags US$2.5M seed for Indonesia expansion
GajiGesa was founded in 2020 by the husband-wife duo of Vidit Agrawal and Martyna Malinowska.
Agrawal is Uber’s first employee in Asia and ex-COO of Singaporean automotive marketplace startup Carro, which turned unicorn this June. Malinowska was previously at Standard Chartered and Singapore-based fintech startup LenddoEFL.
GajiGesa’s fintech platform offers companies and their employees the tools to streamline their cash flow by providing financial services, including EWA, financial literacy content and bill payments.
“The pandemic has accentuated the importance of having an empowered workforce and holistic workplace benefits,” said Malinowska. “In these turbulent times, our platform has become an invaluable tool enabling employers to actively help their employees reduce financial stress and take control of their financial futures.”
The Jakarta-based startup claims that its wellness solution built around EWA sees 40x growth this year, while its integrated employee management solution GajiTim now serves over 200,000 users. GajiTim supports employers to digitally and easily manage workforce-related tasks such as daily/monthly wages, attendance/leaves, salary calculation, payments, and more.
GajiGesa serves 120 clients spanning sectors such as factories, plantations, manufacturing, retail, restaurants, hospitals, and tech companies.
Also read: Indonesia, Singapore, Vietnam the most attractive fintech hubs in SEA: Study
“Millions of workers and SMEs across Southeast Asia remain underserved. We’re on a mission to expand financial security and dignity to every workplace by giving workers access to their hard-earned wages on-demand,” said Agarwal.
The new round comes less than a year after the startup attracted US$2.5 million in a seed funding round, co-led by Silicon Valley-based Defy.vc and Quest Ventures.
GajiGesa joins other regional firms such as Indonesia’s wagely and Vietnam’s GIMO to double down on improving financial stability for workers through EWA. Other noted EWA providers are US-based Payactiv, UK-based Wagestream, Mexican firm Minu, and US-based Even.
Dailypay, a leading US-based EWA provider, raised US$500 million in May and reached unicorn status. Payactiv also counts more than two million users and has processed more than US$5 billion in EWA. This highlight the tremendous potential of the space.
According to the World Bank’s Financial Inclusion Insights in 2017, 66 per cent of Indonesia’s population are “unbanked” and only 11 per cent of its e-money app users are regular users.
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Image Credit: GajiGesa
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