Rewire, an Israeli fintech startup, announced the closing of its $20 million Series B funding round. The investment was led by OurCrowd, with participation from Glilot Capital - through Glilot+ growth fund, Moneta, Opera Tech Ventures, Viola Fintech, Renegade Partners, Prof. Yair Tauman, and Jerry Yang, former Yahoo! CEO and director at Alibaba, who joined the round through AME Cloud Ventures.
Financial inclusion for migrant workers
The Rewire platform is intended for migrant workers, who want to transfer money to their families back home. Currently, most migrant workers are forced to use costly solutions to send money or ones that leave them powerless when wanting to actually manage their finances - both in the country of work and country of origin.
As an alternative, the Rewire solution provides migrants financial freedom by enabling them to deposit money into a digital account and spend locally via an issued credit card. Due to the virtual base of the Rewire neobank, migrant workers and their families back home can conveniently manage their finances from anywhere in the world. CEO Guy Kashtan explains in a chat with Geektime that the company developed a whole infrastructure to handle dozens of integrations with financial services and fraud prevention services, and others.
Rewire CEO, Guy Kashtan said: “At our core, we aim to create financial inclusion. Everything that we do at Rewire is aimed to help migrants to build a more financially secure future for themselves and their families. To do so, we aim to provide services that go beyond traditional banking services such as insurance payments in the migrant’s home country and savings accounts. This investment and licenses are major steps towards fulfilling our company’s vision and will be used for additional expansion of geographies and products.”
The company operates in dozens of countries and holds a customer base of close to half a million migrant workers, who run half a billion dollars in transactions through the platform annually. Rewire tripled its users during 2020, experiencing 40% growth, which according to the company were achieved organically.
In response to the round, Kashtan added that Rewire creates a significant global impact, empowering migrant workers with economic equality and financial independence, thus “making society more just.” Kashtan said that the newly raised funds will help the company expand product offering, as well as enter new markets and countries, and recruit talent for product and development teams.
OurCrowd CEO, Jon Medved said: “We have been strong supporters of Rewire since inception, investing in the seed round and leading this current round. It is a real pleasure to be proven right about our initial investment thesis, especially when this company is not only producing great results and growing at a very rapid rate, but also helping so many people achieve financial inclusion and get absolutely necessary banking services from a great platform like Rewire.”
Rewire was founded in 2015 by CEO Guy Kashtan, VP R&D Adi Ben Dayan, CTO Saar Yahalom, and Or Benoz. The company currently employs a team of 130 people, with 115 of them stationed in Israel.
