Online classifieds portal Quikr is said to be in advanced talks to acquire Babajob, an online jobs portal which connects blue-collar workers. With the acquisition, the company is hoping to consolidate its jobs vertical QuikrJobs’ position in the Indian blue-collar job market.
In a report from Economic Times, a person aware of the matter said, “The acquisition would give Quikr access to smaller cities that Babajob was popular in”. He further adds that a few employees at Babajob have already been informed about the acquisition.
Babajob, a platform based in Bangalore, operates an interactive voice response-based recruitment service where it enables users to sign up and search jobs. It is built to work in the user’s local language. Both the website and app are available in regional languages such as Hindi, Marathi, Kannada, Gujarati, Tamil, etc. It enables employers to track, rate and save feedback on candidates who apply for jobs. The platform connects in-bound calls from screened candidates directly to the employers.
The startup claims to have over 7 million registered job-seekers and approximately 5,00,000 employers scouting for talent on its platform. The service is currently available in over 20 cities including Coimbatore, Bhopal, Indore, besides Bengaluru, Mumbai and Delhi. The platform lists blue-collar service-based jobs like drivers, delivery executives, entry-level sales professionals, BPO executives, etc.
Founded in 2012, the startup raised a seed funding round of ₹3.5 crore from Gray Ghost Ventures and Khosla Impact. In April 2016, it raised $10 million in a round of funding led by Australian-based online employment marketplace Seek.
On the other hand, Quikr Jobs claims to be receiving 5 million applications per month and had seen a 50% increase in user base. If the acquisition deal goes through, this would mark the ninth acquisition by Quikr since 2016, as it looks to consolidate position in several verticals like jobs, real estate and services.
Last year, it acquired CommonFloor, Grabhouse, Stepni, ZapLuk, Salosa, StayGlad, and Hiree. Earlier this year it acquired local services startup Zimmber in a deal worth $10 million. Quikr has raised $350 million till now from investors like Kinnevik, Tiger Global Management, Matrix Partners India and Warburg Pincus, and was last valued at around $1.4 billion.
At the end of the financial year 2017, the QuikrJobs platform broke even. The company has seen a 3x growth in revenues within its job vertical in the 2017 financial year which it claims is a result of the way it has managed to maintain a “healthy balance” between its recruitment services both online and offline.
Although Quikr has several categories under its jobs umbrella including QuikrJobs (blue collar), Hiree (white collar market) and QuikrPro (B2B transaction model), QuikrJobs is the primary generator of profit contributing to about 75% of the revenue share.
