Tiger Global, which has been largely dormant and heavily cautious in India’s startup scene off late, has announced fresh investment in home services startup UrbanClap. The firm is bankrolling a fresh $75Mn Series E round into the startup, along with participation from existing investors — Steadview Capital and Vy Capital. Fund deployment will largely be into expanding business.
According to the startup, some early investors are also cashing in through this round, thus existing the company. UrbanClap has raised close to $185 Million till date.
The platform is fairly popular in India now. As a customer, as soon as you sign up, you can select from a range of home services that the app lists. It then matches service people such as cleaners, repair staff and beauticians with customers across 10 cities in India and Dubai and Abu Dhabi.
In an interaction with TechCrunch, Co founder and CEO Abhiraj Bhal says that UrbanClap lets blue collar workers like these, get more work and eventually increase earnings. This also helps them in getting rid of the umpteen number of middlemen who have traditionally run these worker networks.
“The UrbanClap model really allows them to become service entrepreneurs. Their earnings will shoot up two or three-fold, and it isn’t uncommon to see it rise as much as 8X — it’s a life-changing experience,” he said in an interaction with TechCrunch. Average value of a service is between $17 to $22, according to the company.
In recent years, UrbanClap has also started to offer training, credit, and basic banking services to better support the service workers on its platform. On its website, UrbanClap claims to offer 73 services — including kitchen cleaning, hairdressing, and yoga training. It says it has served 3 million customers.
