Frex Raises INR 9.5 Crore in Pre Seed Funding to Reimagine Cross Border Payments for the Global Indian Community

Frex, a global peer to peer payments platform built to simplify international money transfers for immigrants, has raised INR 9.5 crore in a pre-seed funding round jointly led by Zeropearl VC and White Venture Capital. The round also saw participation from a strong group of strategic angels including Abhiraj Singh Bhal, Varun Khaitan and Raghav Chandra of Urban Company, Pradeep Parameswaran, Global Head of Mobility at Uber, Kunal Shah, Founder of Cred, and Rishabh Goel, Founder of Credgenics.

Founded with the vision of making cross border money movement as seamless and affordable as domestic digital payments, Frex enables immigrants and global workers to send money home instantly and at ultra-low cost. The platform offers better than mid-market exchange rates with near real time settlement and zero fees, positioning itself as a modern alternative to traditional remittance channels that are often slow, expensive and opaque.

Frex was born from a problem the founders experienced personally. During years of living and working across the United States and Europe, the team faced repeated challenges while sending money home to India. Transfers took days to process, pricing lacked transparency, and fees along with forex mark ups ranged between one to five percent. What began as a lived frustration soon evolved into a clear opportunity to build a faster, fairer and more inclusive global payments platform.

The founding team of Aditya Varma, Himanshu Arora and Nikhil Shanker bring over a decade of startup building experience each, having held leadership roles across companies such as Uber, Urban Company and TravelPlus. Together, they set out to remove friction from global remittances and bring speed, fairness and transparency to millions of users who rely on cross border transfers every month.

The newly raised capital will be used to expand Frex’s on and off ramp infrastructure across North America and India, strengthen the compliance and regulatory stack across key corridors, scale engineering and ledger systems to support high volume transactions, and accelerate go to market efforts in NRI and migrant worker communities.

As the company prepares for its next phase of expansion, the founders believe the global remittance landscape is ready for a fundamental shift toward faster and more transparent digital money movement.

Commenting on the funding, Aditya Varma, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Frex, said, “Cross border payments remain one of the slowest and most expensive areas of financial services, and this burden falls directly on migrants and global workers. With more than two trillion dollars moving across borders every year, we see a massive opportunity to transform this experience end to end. We are glad to have White Venture Capital and Zero Pearl as partners as we build a platform that makes global money movement fast, fair and transparent.”

Investors also believe that the timing is right for a new player from India to emerge as a global category leader in remittances.

Sharing the investor perspective, Bipin Shah, Managing Partner at Zeropearl VC, said, “India has one of the largest and most affluent global diasporas in the world. Despite being the largest recipient of personal remittances globally, there is no Desi platform that features among the top global remittance players today. We believe Frex is well positioned to change this and build a category defining global payments company from India.”

Further reinforcing this confidence, White Venture Capital highlighted the strength of the founding team and the technology powering Frex’s platform.

Sweta Rau, Founder and GP at White Venture Capital, added, “Frex is addressing a real and urgent need in cross border payments by putting speed, transparency and affordability at the centre of the experience. The founding team brings strong execution capability and deep market understanding. We are excited to support their journey as they build a globally scalable remittance platform from India.”

The early user response reflects this growing confidence. Since its launch in November, Frex has seen rising transaction volumes and rapid adoption among immigrant communities, and the company expects to cross one million dollars in monthly transfers within the next two to three months.