UrbanClap, which touts itself to be the largest mobile-based services marketplace in India, has raised $25 million in its latest funding round which was led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation of existing investors Accel Partners and SAIF Partners.
With this funding round, the company is now valued at more than $100 million. Earlier, the Gurgaon-based startup had raised $10 million in Series A round. Prior to that, it had raised $1.6 million in seed funding.
UrbanClap was founded in 2014 by Abhiraj Bhal, Varun Khaitan, and Raghav Chandra with an aim to use technology and smart processes to structure the highly unorganized services market in India.
The company enables users find any service professional such as a plumber, a wedding photographer, a yoga teacher, or an interior designer. They want to be the go-to platform for helping customers complete projects that are important to their urban lives.
Once you explain your situation by providing answers to simple questions, the company shows you a list of suitable professionals within hours. You can go through their profile, experience and compare rates. If you are interested in availing services of either of those, you can reach out to them directly.
Currently, the company is serving more than 5,000 customer requests per day, and with an active seller base of more than 20,000 professionals. It currently operates in Delhi NCR, Bengaluru, Mumbai, Chennai and Pune. UrbanClap also crossed a major milestone, wherein it did $10Mn worth of transactions within just 6 months of its mobile app launch. However, it continues to agressively expand its services to 25 more cities and 100 categories in one year.
Commenting about the investment, Vishal Gupta, MD of Bessemer Venture Partners, said,
It takes a tonne of technology-led processes and supply-side thinking to make it work so fast, that it creates customers and providers delight. We are impressed with how the Urban-Clap team has aggressively built this mobile marketplace in a short period of time, and a capital efficient manner to become the industry leader.
The home services market in India, though still nascent, has seen a lot of startups crowding this segment. And while a lot of them have had enough cash from investors, problems have slowly started to creep in. Investors will also be vary of what happened tp the US based upstart HomeJoy, which ultimtaely had to shut shop. As for competition, during UrbanClap’s previous $10 million round to fuel its expansion, Zimmber raised $2 million from IDG Ventures and others for a similar model.
While most of the startups in this space are raising funds to expand their services, operations and team, LocalOye recently laid-off around 30 percent of its staff as the company is building an automated platform that will require fewer manual interventions to service its clients.
