Arthum raises Rs 10 crore to formalise contract workforce

Arthum, a workforce management startup focused on contract labour, on Wednesday announced raising ₹10 crore in a seed funding round led by Caret Capital, with participation from Keynote Financial Services and JS Global.

Founded in 2023 by Darpan Sharma and Vishal Mishra, Arthum positions itself as an operating system for managing contract workers, a segment that employs more than 100 million people in the country though remaining largely informal.

Arthum’s platform connects enterprises, labour contractors, and workers on a single digital system, offering tools such as geo-tagged attendance, payroll processing, digital payments, contracts and statutory compliance. The company said it currently automates key operations for more than 300,000 labour contractors and has onboarded more than 600,000 workers so far, primarily in the Delhi-NCR region.


The startup is now expanding operations to industrial clusters including Dehradun, Chandigarh, Ludhiana, Jaipur, and Ahmedabad. “This investment will help us strengthen our technology stack, expand geographically, and unlock deeper financial inclusion through data-led credit and banking innovation,” said Sharma, also the chief executive of Arthum.

A key part of the company’s model is its integrated neo-banking layer, which uses workforce data to enable access to banking, insurance, and credit products for blue-collar workers.

“By investing in Arthum, we aim to accelerate the formalisation of India’s 120 million-plus blue-collar workers and enable over 300,000 labour contractors to enter the formal economy,” said Pankaj Bansal, co-founder and managing partner, Caret Capital.

Unlike traditional contractor management models that rely on fragmented and manual processes, Arthum is betting on a full-stack approach that combines workforce management, compliance and financial services, according to the company.