UrbanClap raises US$ 10mn in Series A funding!

UrbanClap, India’s largest mobile services marketplace, has raised USD 10 million in funding from its exiting investors SAIF Partners and Accel Partners. The company, currently serving Delhi-NCR, Bangalore and Mumbai plans to invest the funds to scale its operations Pan-India, strengthening its technology, and growing its 100 member team to 500+.

Started in October 2014 by Abhiraj Bhal (IIM Ahmedabad, IIT Kanpur, BCG), Varun Khaitan (IIT Kanpur, BCG) and Raghav Chandra (early Twitter engineer, UC Berkeley), UrbanClap offers a high quality experience of hiring 50+ services across 5 major categories – Home (Electricians, Plumbers, Cleaners, Interior Designers 

etc.), Health (Yoga, Fitness Trainers, Nutritionists etc.), Events (Planners, Photographers, Caterers etc.), Lessons (Music, Dance etc.) and other personal services (Salon at home, party make-up etc.). You only need to take a few seconds, enter your needs on their Android app or www.urbanclap.com, and the platform does the rest. All professionals on UrbanClap are put through a stringent background and quality check process, to ensure that the customers only get the best.

Earlier this year, UrbanClap had raised a seed round of INR USD 1.6 million from SAIF Partners, Accel Partners and Kunal Bahl, Rohit Bansal – the founders of Snapdeal.

Commenting on the round, Abhiraj Singh Bhal, the co-founder said, “The problem we are solving, hiring of a trusted local service professional, is extremely broken. The world over, companies have attempted to solve with, with limited success. We are committed to solving this problem deeply, and end-to-end, no matter how long it takes. In a short span of a few months since launch, we have seen phenomenal traction from customers. We are currently serving 1000+ customer requests each day. Additionally, we have a strong, engaged base of 5000+ suppliers, connected to our merchant app. With the new funding, we plan to grow 10 times on every metric in the quarter.”

UrbanClap works on two simple models. For standardized, blue collared services like electricians or home cleaning, where you just want the job done, you can directly book and pay for the service on their app. For white collared services, which is the larger part of the business, like photographers, interior designers or yoga instructors, UrbanClap makes the effort to understand exactly what you need, and helps you hire the right professional, in your budget, most suited to meet that need. This is done through a sophisticated, automated match-making algorithm, which the team is investing heavily to continue perfecting. UrbanClap also does a background check and police verification for all its professionals. For this purpose, they have hired a retired superintendent of police.

Mukul Singhal, SAIF Partners, said, “Local Services is a very big market and pain point for the India consumer. There is high level of non-standardization of service quality, pricing and supplier base. The market is ripe for disruption, both from a discovery and consumption of services perspective. And we think that UrbanClap team has done a phenomenal job in executing so far. We are excited to partner in their journey of creating a large platform benefitting both consumers and merchants of various services.”

Abhinav Chaturvedi, Accel India, said, “Local services is a globally unsolved problem. The UrbanClap team just does not want to settle for sub-optimal, and constantly keeps trying new things to perfect their model. We believe that their smartphone based approach, high quality team and sharp focus on customer experience will differentiate them."