Shantel
Salt Labs (saltlabs.com), a new loyalty and payments technology company today announced it has raised $10 million in a pre-seed funding round. The financing was led by Fin Capital with participation from Anthem Venture Partners, along with other investors.
Salt Labs founding team includes Jason Lee and Rob Law who previously co-founded unicorn company DailyPay which created the on-demand pay industry to address income inequality for hourly workers.
The mission of Salt Labs is to enable hourly workers to own the long-term value of their work. Unlike white collar workers who are afforded several opportunities to build long-term wealth through company stock plans, partnership interests, or even a 401k plan, it is often the case that frontline workers aren’t afforded those same opportunities for a variety of technology or cost reasons. This has resulted in the growing wealth gap disparity.
According to a recent report from the Economic Policy Institute, the gap between worker productivity and hourly compensation has grown dramatically over the past 40 years. Productivity is up roughly 62% while wages are up roughly 16%. The growth implied from heightened productivity went to higher corporate profits which ultimately made up shareholder returns and higher salaries for the top tier of earners. Additionally, the Federal Reserve reports that 1 in 4 Americans exit the workforce with zero retirement savings, and 2 out of 3 workers today believe they are not tracking for retirement.
Salt Labs’ technology changes how a worker earns and enables them to capture the value of their work, on top of their regular paycheck. Through its offering, Salt Labs is reinventing the way in which hourly workers earn in order to help them build towards a secure financial future. An initial version of the product is meant to launch next month.
Today, the company is announcing its $10 mm pre-seed financing round, led by Fin Capital. “We back repeat founders and having collaborated successfully with Jason and Rob at DailyPay, we are thrilled to support them in building Salt Labs – the future of worker equity,” said Logan Allin, Managing Partner and founder of Fin Capital, who is also joining the Board of Directors. “Fin Capital was an ideal partner for us given their full life cycle investment strategy. We are looking forward to partnering with them from pre-seed to IPO. We are also excited that 100% of our institutional investors are DailyPay investors who have backed us before,” said Jason Lee, CEO of Salt Labs.
The company also announced today that media veteran Gary Ginsberg has joined Salt Labs as a board advisor.
About the company
Salt Labs is on a mission to enable hourly workers to own the long-term value of their work. Salt Labs was founded by a team that includes repeat entrepreneurs, Jason Lee and Rob Law, the co-founders of DailyPay.
