Frex raises Rs 9.5 Cr led by Zeropearl VC and White Venture Capital

Peer-to-peer payments platform Frex has raised Rs 9.5 crore in a pre-seed funding round co-led by Zeropearl VC and White Venture Capital, with participation from a group of strategic angels including Abhiraj Singh Bhal, Varun Khaitan and Raghav Chandra of Urban Company, Pradeep Parameswaran, CRED founder Kunal Shah, and Rishabh Goel.

The proceeds will be used to expand its on- and off-ramp infrastructure across North America and India, strengthen the compliance and regulatory stack across key corridors, scale engineering and ledger systems, and accelerate go-to-market efforts within NRI and migrant worker communities, Frex said in a press release.

Co-founded this year by Aditya Varma, Himanshu Arora and Nikhil Shanker, Frex is a peer-to-peer money transfer platform that offers instant, low-cost cross-border payments. The platform delivers better-than-mid-market rates with near-instant settlement across key corridors and transparent pricing. It combines modern blockchain infrastructure with strict compliance and local banking integrations to make global money movement simple, fast and affordable.

Frex aims to make cross-border money movement as seamless and affordable as domestic digital payments. It enables immigrants and global workers to send money home instantly and at ultra-low cost.

The Gurugram-based startup addresses bottlenecks such as transfers that take days to process, a lack of pricing transparency, and fees along with forex mark-ups ranging from one to five percent. The platform intends to position itself as a modern alternative to traditional remittance channels, which are often slow, expensive and opaque.

Since its launch in November, Frex claims it has seen rising transaction volumes and rapid adoption among immigrant communities, and the company expects to cross $1 million in monthly transfers within the next two to three months.

It may directly or indirectly compete with other startups in this space, such as Wise, Remitly and Xoom.