Arthum Raises ₹10 Cr to Formalise Contract Work

Arthum’s ₹10 crore seed round led by Caret Capital signals a shift toward digitising contractors, compliant payroll and credit access for workers.

Arthum’s ₹10 crore seed round: a signal moment for contract-workforce infrastructure

India’s startup ecosystem has a steady rhythm of seed rounds, but every so often a funding announcement doubles as a marker of where the real “infrastructure bets” are moving. Arthum’s newly announced ₹10 crore seed round—led by Caret Capital with participation from Keynote Financial Services and JS Global—fits that description because it targets a segment that quietly powers India’s industrial and services engine: contract labour.​

From the Global Martech Alliance (GMA) Council lens, this is not only a “startup raises capital” headline. It is a strong indicator that operational data—attendance trails, wage histories, compliance artifacts, and verified worker identities—is becoming the next critical layer for formalization at scale, much like CRM became the system of record for customer relationships. GMA’s broader mission focuses on helping teams discover, evaluate, and adopt tools through practical, decision-oriented insight, and Arthum is best understood as a category-defining “system of record” for a workforce segment that has historically operated without one.

Arthum positions itself as an operating system for contract workforce management, addressing a market that employs more than 100 million people in India while remaining largely informal. That phrasing matters: “operating system” implies a platform designed to coordinate many moving parts—enterprises, contractors, workers, documentation, payroll logic, and policy requirements—rather than a single-feature product. In martech terms, this is the difference between a point tool and a platform that can anchor an ecosystem.​

The investors backing the round have been explicit about the ambition behind this bet. Caret Capital’s managing partner Pankaj Bansal has described the goal as accelerating formalization for India’s 120 million+ blue-collar workers and bringing 300k+ labour contractors into the formal economy. Whether or not the upper-bound vision is reached quickly, the direction is clear: funding is following platforms that can make the informal workforce “visible” to systems—compliance systems, payment systems, and eventually credit and insurance systems.​

The real problem: informal work is not just “unorganized,” it’s undocumented

To understand why a workforce-management startup is drawing attention, it helps to reframe the underlying issue. The challenge is not simply that informal work is unorganized; it is that informal work is often undocumented in ways that matter to institutions. When work is mediated through cash payments, verbal agreements, paper registers, and fragmented contractor networks, the economic activity exists—but the data exhaust is too thin to support protections, portability, or financial inclusion.

That documentation gap has cascading consequences:

• Workers struggle to prove income stability, tenure, and employment continuity—three ingredients lenders and insurers typically require.
• Enterprises face leakage and errors in attendance-to-wage calculations, while also carrying compliance risk when documentation is inconsistent.
• Contractors operate as critical intermediaries but often lack formal tools to run like “real businesses” with audit trails, predictable cash-flow planning, and structured records.

Arthum’s bet is that formalization starts with operational truth: capturing who worked, where, for how long, under what terms, and how they were paid—then turning that into verifiable records that stakeholders can trust. Economic Times notes Arthum’s focus on contract labour and the company’s aim to formalise the segment through a platform that links labour management with banking access.​

This is where the GMA Council perspective becomes useful. GMA positions itself as a place to “find, compare, and review marketing tools,” but the deeper theme is decision support: helping leaders adopt platforms that reduce friction and create measurable outcomes. In this context, Arthum is effectively doing for labour operations what mature SaaS stacks did for marketing operations: replacing informal workflows with standardised, trackable processes—so scale becomes possible.

Arthum’s platform approach: turning fragmented workflows into an “end-to-end system”

Arthum was founded in 2023 by Darpan Sharma and Vishal Mishra. In a short span, the company has packaged multiple functions that usually sit in different silos—workforce tracking, payroll mechanics, documentation, and compliance—into a single operating layer built for contract labour realities.​

As described in funding coverage, the platform connects stakeholders across the contract labour ecosystem and aims to remove information gaps that cause disputes, payment errors, and trust breakdowns. This “connective” approach matters because contract labour is rarely a simple employer–employee relationship. It often looks like a multi-sided network: enterprises, multiple contractors, supervisors, and workers who may shift across sites and projects.​

From an implementation standpoint, Arthum’s design can be thought of as four integrated rails:

1) Verification rail (attendance and presence)
Contract labour operations depend on precise, site-level attendance—often across multiple shifts and locations. A platform that can digitise attendance consistently creates the base layer for everything else: wage calculations, compliance documentation, dispute resolution, and worker history.

2) Payment rail (wages and processing)
When attendance moves into a digital record, wage calculation and payroll processing can become repeatable. Entrackr’s coverage notes that Arthum combines workforce management with an integrated neo-banking layer and that the company plans to deepen financial product offerings. The strategic takeaway is that payroll isn’t just a back-office function—it becomes the “data heartbeat” that enables downstream services.​

3) Documentation rail (contracts and records)
A contract workforce often suffers from “paper drift”—missing, inconsistent, or inaccessible records. Arthum’s operating system framing implies standardized documentation that can be referenced later. That changes behaviour across the chain: enterprises can audit and enforce standards, contractors can manage accountability, and workers can actually access their own records.

4) Compliance rail (rules, statutory obligations, and auditability)
One reason enterprises hesitate to modernise contractor ecosystems is the fear of compliance complexity. A platform that bakes in compliance workflows can reduce risk and create repeatable internal governance. SMEStreet describes Arthum as combining workforce management, compliance, and financial inclusion within an integrated ecosystem.​

This is also where platform strategy shows up. A “full stack” system reduces the integration burden that can slow adoption—especially among contractors who are resource-constrained and may not have IT teams. In martech, stacks fail when implementation overhead is too high; in contract labour ecosystems, that overhead is often fatal. Arthum’s integrated posture is an attempt to make adoption operationally realistic.

The expansion plan: industrial clusters first, then network effects

Seed funding is only as meaningful as what it enables next. According to reporting, Arthum will use the proceeds to strengthen its technology stack, expand geographically, and deepen its financial product offerings. The geographic piece is especially telling because contract labour demand concentrates around industrial corridors, logistics nodes, and high-density urban development.​

Multiple reports note Arthum’s expansion intent into cities and clusters such as Dehradun, Chandigarh, Ludhiana, Jaipur, and Ahmedabad. These are not random pins on a map; they are labour-intensive hubs with manufacturing, warehousing, construction, and services ecosystems where contractor networks tend to be large and repeatable.​

Operationally, Arthum has already shown traction in Delhi NCR, with reporting citing onboarding of 1,500+ labour contractors and 6 lakh+ workers across the region. Early concentration in one region can be a strategic advantage: it allows tighter operational learning loops (support, training, product iteration) before the model is replicated elsewhere.​

From a platform-growth standpoint, expansion can unlock a compounding effect:

• More contractors onboarded means more enterprises can standardise labour operations without rebuilding processes each time they change vendors.
• More workers with verified records increases the dataset that can support responsible financial products (credit, insurance, savings/investment access).
• More enterprises standardising on a shared system can reduce fragmentation across supply chains and project ecosystems.

This is a classic network-building pattern—similar to how B2B SaaS categories scale: land a focused market, deepen product–market fit, then replicate into adjacent clusters where the job-to-be-done looks similar.

The “neo-banking layer”: why verified work data becomes financial infrastructure

The most forward-looking part of Arthum’s story is the integration of financial services directly into the workforce operating layer. Coverage highlights that Arthum runs an integrated neo-banking layer that uses verified worker data to provide access to banking, insurance, credit, and investment products.​

This is a critical point: financial inclusion often fails not because people don’t need products, but because providers can’t underwrite risk without reliable signals. Contract and informal workers frequently lack the conventional artifacts lenders request—formal salary slips, continuous bank statements tied to stable payroll, long-term employer confirmation, and legacy credit histories.

A workforce operating system changes the underwriting equation by generating alternative signals that are both high-frequency and behaviour-based, such as:

• Consistency of attendance over time
• Stability of earnings across months
• Continuity of work across projects and sites
• Employer/contractor validation trails
• Dispute frequency and resolution history (where captured)

Entrackr reports that Arthum has partnered with banks including Yes Bank, ICICI Bank, and IDFC, and with over 15 NBFCs, to offer tailored financial products. SMEStreet similarly notes bank partnerships (including Yes Bank, ICICI Bank, and IDFC) and the involvement of 15+ NBFCs to co-create products for contractors and workers.​

From a GMA Council viewpoint, this blending of operations + finance is one of the most important patterns to watch in India’s next growth cycle. When platforms become trusted sources of verified data, they stop being “tools” and start becoming rails—rails that other institutions can build on. That is the difference between digitisation (moving workflows online) and formalisation (creating structured, verifiable participation in systems of rights and finance).

It also creates a strategic advantage for a platform like Arthum: once wages, attendance, and identity are verified inside one ecosystem, the switching cost rises—not because of lock-in tactics, but because the data history itself becomes valuable to the worker and the contractor.

Implications for formalisation: what changes if platforms like Arthum scale

Arthum’s seed round is a small number by late-stage standards, but its implications are large because it aims at structural inefficiencies. If platforms like this scale, three shifts could become more common across India’s contract labour economy.

1) Formalisation becomes operational, not just regulatory
Formalisation often gets discussed as policy or enforcement. But in practice, formalisation happens when day-to-day workflows make compliance the default—when records are created automatically, payments are traceable, and agreements are accessible. SMEStreet explicitly frames Arthum’s integrated model as reducing payment errors and building digital identities for workers, driving transparency and trust across the value chain.​

2) Contractors evolve from intermediaries into formal operators
Contractors do more than supply labour; they manage attendance, dispute resolution, wage execution, and workforce continuity. When contractors get systems that resemble modern business tooling—dashboards, digital documentation, structured payment rails—they can behave like formal service providers instead of informal intermediaries. Caret Capital’s stated ambition includes bringing contractors into the formal economy alongside workers.​

3) Financial products attach to verified livelihoods, not paperwork
A neo-banking layer tied to verified work history could help reduce the “documentation tax” that informal workers pay when trying to access credit or insurance. If executed responsibly, this can shift financial access from being document-led to being data-led—anchored in real earning behaviour captured through operations.

From GMA’s editorial standpoint, it’s also worth noting the broader ecosystem implication: as workforce records become digital, adjacent categories can emerge—training credentialing, portability of benefits, cross-employer worker profiles, and even worker-first apps that mirror how consumer fintech improved access for retail users.

At the same time, this space requires careful governance. Whenever platforms blend employment data with financial access, the bar rises on:

• Data privacy and consent
• Transparency of underwriting and pricing
• Dispute resolution pathways for workers
• Security practices for sensitive identity and wage information
• Clear accountability between enterprises, contractors, platforms, and financial partners

These are not “nice-to-have” checkboxes; they determine whether formalisation feels like empowerment or surveillance. The long-term winners will be the platforms that build trust through fair outcomes and transparent processes.

Finally, there’s a larger market signal in this round. Economic Times notes the company’s thesis that contract labour is a 100-million+ worker segment that is still largely informal. Investors and founders are effectively saying: the next wave of value creation in India isn’t only in building new consumer apps—it’s in building the operating infrastructure that upgrades how existing work actually functions.​

That is why GMA will keep tracking platforms like Arthum: they sit at the intersection of operations, data systems, and inclusion—exactly the intersection where India’s most meaningful scaling stories are being written.

Suggested internal links for the published version (GMA site): link “marketing tools” to GMA’s tool discovery positioning and link “council-led insight” to relevant council pages, since GMA highlights tool comparison and council content as key offerings.