What is Refrens?

Refrens is building an operating system for freelancers. The company is building an array of tools for freelancers across the globe. The products include invoicing, payments, lead and quotation generation, and escrow services. The company is being built at an intersection of large opportunities in the creator economy, B2B SaaS & horizontal marketplaces.

Naman Sarawagi was the Head of Product at Freecharge and Product Manager at Zipdial. He also had an entrepreneurial stint as Founder of Findyogi - a price comparison engine for e-commerce websites

Mohit Jain was a Technology consultant for multiple renowned startups including Dailyninja, SuperProcure, Sugoi Labs, Unfactory.in. He was also CTO at Findyogi (last venture with Naman) and co-founder, Nested Pointer

Why now?

The company is targeting the 200mn+ white collar freelancers globally. With a $150 target price for a SaaS suite, the market is estimated at $15 bn.

The current set of SaaS tools are fragmented and cumbersome for freelancers’ usage. Payment collections and accounting mechanisms are tough. Additionally, they don’t have a platform to showcase their social and work profile and seek work.

The freelance and creator economy is growing at a phenomenal pace Traditional marketplaces have become crowded and it has become tough to quality service providers and customers in the existing platforms

Why we invested?

Naman had been doing a lot of consulting for startups, this is where he saw service providers struggling in getting quality business, this led him to work on Refrens. They initially launched a commission-based marketplace like Upwork Fiverr and did over 1400 projects.

But they realised that the market for a business like Canva is much more than Upwork and thus decided to create SAAS tools to empower freelancers and created invoicing tool as the first product for free to create a hook for freelancers to do smooth onboarding onto their platform

SaaS tool targeting to make their lives simpler, and having a 1 stop solution for all the requirements from lead generation until payments closure, increasingly looked like an interesting proposition with a massive uptake opportunity globally Now they are building a membership based platform and several SAAS tools are on the cards.

We interacted with their clients and got strong feedback on the quality of service providers they have been able to build on their network. We believe this is a model in which SAAS tools create hooks, a good quality liquidity on the network can create network effects and is a model serving global audience thus has tremendous potential to scale

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