Seven years ago, Jason Lee and Rob Law founded DailyPay with a mission to enable employees to access their pay on their own schedule.
Their vision was “to empower frontline workers to better themselves financially by controlling the timing of their pay.”
Today, DailyPay partners “with nearly a thousand employers who offer DailyPay as an employee benefit to those companies’ 5 million employees, including Fortune 500 companies like Target, Kroger, Dollar Tree, HCA, and McDonalds.”
Since its founding, DailyPay has “raised over $250 mm of equity capital.”
Lee and Law both left their operating roles at DailyPay in mid 2022 and are today announcing their second venture called Salt Labs.
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.
Logan Allin, Managing Partner and founder of Fin Capital, who is also joining the Board, said:
“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.”
Jason Lee, CEO of Salt Labs, said:
“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 pleased that 100% of our institutional investors are DailyPay investors who have backed us before.”
The company also announced “that media veteran Gary Ginsberg has joined Salt Labs as a board advisor.”