Gig Wage Raises $2.5M Follow-On to Its Recent $7.5M Series A Round

After raising a $7.5 million Series A round in October, Gig Wage, the Dallas-based fintech that aims to simplify payroll for the gig economy, has raised an additional $2.5 million to continue boosting its seamless, reliable banking platform.

The deal was led by Jaclyn Hester, the first female partner of Foundry Group, a Colorado-based tech investor. Foundry Group’s primary partner, Brad Feld, who founded TechStars and was raised in Dallas, has a passion for the startup ecosystem here.

The latest round brings Gig Wage’s total Series A funding to around $10 million, the startup told Dallas Innovates.

Last year’s Series A was led by Green Dot, a financial technology and bank holding company based in Pasadena, California. That deal went beyond just an investment—Green Dot became an infrastructure bank partner to Gig Wage, allowing the startup to add Green Dot’s solutions to its instant payments platform for gig workers and a large number of underbanked Americans.

Together, Gig Wage and Green Dot aim to create an infrastructure that allows everyone to access their money. The end goal is to offer the first-ever “comprehensive end-to-end solution for the gig economy.”

Gig Wage Founder and CEO Craig J. Lewis wants to shape the modern financial infrastructure for what his team calls the ‘Future of Work.’ He built the fintech to tackle complex challenges around contractor payroll, payments, and compliance.

[Photo: Jae Oates]

In leveraging Green Dot’s Banking as a Service technology, Gig Wage is now able to design and deploy its own customized banking and money movement solutions, allowing the startup to move forward in introducing its own debit card and other products and tools specifically tailored to workers and employers in the gig economy.

Lewis and his team piggybacked off of COVID accelerating modern touchless payment technology and branchless banking. Because most essential workers are 1099 contractors—and part of the under-banked community, the team says—the partnership with Green Dot allowed Gig Wage to immensely help these front-line workers.

The gig economy pays around 65 to 75 million people as independent contractors, amounting to an estimated $2 trillion in transactions. But, the Gig Wage teams says, the payroll structure is designed for traditional work situations—leaving 1099 workers to lose 2-20 percent of their income.

That’s why Gig Wage’s solution benefits both sides of a transaction: It enables employers to instantly pay 1099 workers with more control, flexibility, and scale, and gives independent contractors a convenient and efficient way to receive payments.

With the new funding, Gig Wage told us it plans to quadruple in size by the end of 2021 and continue leveraging Green Dot’s Banking as a Service platform to design and deploy its own banking and money movement solutions.

Gig Wage expects to move forward on its debit card, which will have no monthly free, free online pay, free cash withdrawals at more than 19,000 ATMs, and free cash pick-up at over 7,000 retail locations nationwide.