Tapchief, the networking platform that helps advice seeking professionals connect to the right industry experts, has announced raising of a fresh $650K round from a host of investors. As many as 50 investors are a part of the round, including marquee Indian angels like FreeCharge founder Kunal Shah, ex-Flipkart CPO Mekin Maheshwari among others.
Existing investors Paytm, NuVentures and Vokal founder Aprameya Radhakrishna also participated in the funding round. The Bengaluru-based startup plans to use the fresh funds to expand the team and accelerate its product development. Tapchief was also a finalist at The Tech Portal’s PitchOff Season 3.
Speaking on the freshly raised round, Tapchief CEO Shashank Murali said, “An increasing number of highly-skilled professionals want the freedom to work on challenging problems and teams without a full-time job. We are de-risking the concept of remote independent work by creating thousands of solopreneurs who help businesses achieve key objectives every day”.
Tapchief was started as more of a career advice platform, in 2016 by its founders Shashank Murali, Binay Krishna, and Arjun Krishna. At that point in time, TapChief enabled users to connect and schedule calls with any of the 5,000 listed experts on the platform. The current model was the result of a pivot that the startup went through in mid 2017. As of now, It claims to have more than 75,000 professionals on its platform, of which about 30% are full-time freelancers.
Fundamentally, TapChief enables clients to source and shortlist industry experts to consult or work on specific problems across various functions like strategy, technology, marketing, finance, sales, and operations, depending on their budget and timelines. While the model sounds like a hybrid of Freelancing platforms and LinkedIn, comprehensive curation and meticulously bifurcated experts are what Tapchief banks on.
The company claims that over 20,000 gigs have been completed on its platform with the total earnings by experts crossing more than a million dollars.
