Flexing It, a unique New Delhi based online marketplace for consultants and on-demand expertise, has raised $500,000 in angel round of funding froma group of angel investors. The newly infused funding will be used by the company to scale its business development and marketing efforts and also to continue to strengthen the product.
The investors who participated in the round are former McKinsey Partner, Tilman Ehrbeck; Colvyn Harris, advertising professional and ex-CEO JWT S Asia; Arjun Dhawan, head of HCC Infrastructure and the Dhawan Family Office as well as Dhruv Agarwala, CEO, ProperTiger.com and Makaan.com, among others. (via iamWire)
Founded by Chandrika Pasricha, Flexing It is an online platform which connects organisations to professionals and expertise on an on-demand basis for projects, consulting assignments, advisory roles and part-time resource needs. Since the company started operations in 2012, it has built a community of over 12,000 professionals, and already has over 1,000 companies using its platform.
The company’s vision is to be the largest platform for freelance and project-based work for business skills, leveraged by millions of independent professionals and the organisations that need their expertise.
For professionals, it aims to provide the ability to craft a great portfolio of work on their terms, and reduce the risk of working independently by providing access to a large number of quality assignments that the company source and bring to the platform. Organizations can obtain experienced and skilled resources for the duration and intensity they need.
For companies, there are three types of offerings – MyFlex Prepaid, which costs Rs. 1,500 per post; MyFlex Postpaid, which costs Rs. 6,000 per post and SuperFlex, which costs Rs. 20,000 per post. For individuals or professionals, registering, creating a skill profile and applying for roles remains free of cost. However, it offers background verification service as well as reference validation service through FlexCheck and FlexCheck Plus.
As per Internet Trends Report-2015 by Kleiner Perkins, the freelancing and project-based work economy has huge growth potential – 34% of the US workforce is already freelancing and Forbes estimates this number to grow to 50% by 2020.
Tilman Ehrbeck, who has invested in Flexing It, said,
The market for project-based, flexible work has been largely unorganised and based on personal networks – I believe curated marketplaces can play a huge role in extracting its potential.
Ireena Vittal, a former McKinsey Partner, and an advisor to Flexing It, said,
The future of jobs is a big debate and as jobs change, the market for jobs will evolve too. Chandrika and team have patiently created a world-class product in a big emerging segment of this market, i.e. flexible jobs. An easy, intuitive product, it will help women increase job participation and specialists find options more easily.
