Gautam Bhardwaj is aiming to get 100 million workers in the informal sectors of India’s economy — from Uber drivers to farmers to domestic servants — to start saving for retirement over the next five years.

For the co-founder and director of Singapore-based pension-tech provider pinBox Solutions Pte. Ltd., that amounts to a quick pivot from an initial success in Rwanda — where in close collaboration with the government, pinBox helped 1.5 million informal sector workers, a quarter of that country’s workforce, save a combined 20 billion Rwandan francs ($19 million) over the past three years — to take on a far bigger and more complicated challenge.

PinBox, launched in 2016, looks to build on the progress emerging markets have made in promoting digital finance and close to universal mobile phone penetration by providing the technical “glue,” in the form of application programming interface software, that can make that digital infrastructure function as an “ecosystem” for informal sector retirement savings.

“What we do is use technology and technical assistance to help people, governments, countries, regulators, mainstream financial institutions to set up inclusive pension arrangements,” Mr. Bhardwaj said. The company’s goal is to allow any country “to switch on a national level pension program for informal workers within a few weeks, and with near-zero capital investment,” he added.

Meanwhile, pinBox in July raised its first $1 million from Mumbai-based investor Venture Catalysts Private Ltd. after avoiding raising money for the first five years out of concerns the team would come under pressure to focus on revenues before it had set a strong enough foundation for commercial sustainability.

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