We’re building the high street’s honest directory.
Local business discovery in India is broken in a specific way: the ratings you read aren’t attached to anything. Anyone can post, nobody paid, and the top result usually bought the slot. Finwo starts from the opposite end — the payment.
If the only people who can review a shop are the people who actually paid there, a rating stops being an opinion and starts being evidence. That single constraint is the product. Everything else in Finwo — the QR, the wallet, the cashback, the merchant app — exists to make that constraint work in the real world.
The cashback isn’t a growth gimmick. Honest reviews are the thing that makes the directory worth opening, and asking people to write them for free is how you end up with a wall of five stars from the owner’s cousins. So we pay for them, out of our own commission, and we let people choose: take the money instantly and the review locks, or keep a ten-minute window to change your mind.
On the other side of the counter, the corner café is competing with businesses that have product teams. It shouldn’t need one. A merchant on Finwo gets payments, a real storefront, offers, staff accounts with proper permissions, and reports they’ll actually open — for no listing fee, because a directory with no shops in it is worth nothing to anyone.
Four rules we don’t bend.
A review is only worth something if it’s true
You can only review a merchant you actually paid. Merchants can reply but can never delete. Moderators act on content rules, never on sentiment. We would rather have fewer reviews than flattering ones.
Pay people for the work they do
Writing a useful review takes a minute of someone’s life and makes the next person’s decision easier. That has value, so we pay for it — out of our commission, never out of the merchant’s margin.
The high street deserves better tools
The café on your corner is competing with companies that have engineering teams. We build the software so they don’t have to — payments, storefront, reviews, and reports, for no listing fee.
Ranking isn’t for sale
No merchant can buy their way to the top of your search results. Distance, category, and what real customers said — that’s the whole ordering.
Three sides, one network.
A single Finwo account can be all three at once — plenty of our merchants are somebody else’s customer on the way home.
Customers
Discover verified shops nearby, pay by QR, and earn cashback for honest reviews.
Merchants
Accept payments, publish products and offers, manage staff with real permissions, and read plain-language reports.
Field agents
Onboard businesses in the pincodes you know, walk them through KYC, and earn a commission per store that goes live.
Want to build this with us?
We’re a small team in Chennai, hiring across engineering, design, and field ops.
Get in touch