Bangalore-based Refrens, which helps freelancers and small businesses with invoices and payment, has raised funds from a group of angel investors including Paytm’s Vijay Shekhar Sharma and Shaadi.com founder Anupam Mittal. Early-stage fund Firstcheque, Gireesh Subramaniam of Freshworks, Sujayath Ali and Naveneetha Krishnan, founders of Voonik, Amit Lakhotia of Park+, Zebpay CEO Ajeet Khurana and founders of DailyNinja also participated in the round.

Launched in July 2019, Refrens offers invoicing, payments and expense management systems designed for business-to-business

service providers including designers, software developers, accountants, marketers, consultants among others. Founded by Naman Sarawagi and Mohit Jain, the startup currently has 12,000 businesses and freelancers using the platform, which is growing at 10 per cent every week, it said in a statement.

“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,” said Naman Sarawagi, founder of Refrens. “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.”

Sarawagi has been part of early-stage teams at startups like Freecharge and ZipDial, while Mohit Jain had earlier founded a school enterprise resource planning startup and was CTO at FindYogi. He has been a tech consultant to startups including DailyNinja and SuperProcure.

Kushal Bhagia, CEO of FirstCheque, said: “Freelancers and B2B service providers are 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.”