The job market of 2021 is tough, with number of candidates far surpassing the number of openings. This, in turn, gives rise to a lot of competition among job seekers. Add to that those who migrate from villages to cities and towns in search of work, often lacking in skills and experience, (who have suffered the most during the pandemic), and the situation seems like an endless puzzle. This is why job searching platforms are flourishing at the moment, and led by this change in market trend, Apna has raised a new round of funding.
Bengaluru-based start-up Apna, which helps millions of such blue and grey-collar workers gain the necessary skills and find blue-collar jobs during the ongoing pandemic, has raised $70 million in a Series B funding round led by Tiger Global and Insight Partners, raising its valuation to $570 million. Existing investors, Sequoia Capital India, Lightspeed India, Greenoaks Capital and Rocketship VC also participated in the round.
Apna has raised over $90 million to date within 16 months of the product launch.
The company said that it plans to scale up its business both in existing cities and expand into international markets (mainly, the US and Southeast Asia) over the next six months with the proceeds of the funding round, as the start-up looks forward to help restart the economy of the country as it recovers from the pandemic.
The startup also plans to continue investments in hiring good talent and building engineering and product capabilities.
With over 10 million users, 1,00,000 employers (including Byju’s, Unacademy, Flipkart, Zomato, Licious, and Burger King), and having facilitated more than 15 million job interviews last month, Apna is growing, and its services are indispensable in the world’s second-largest internet market where unemployment is still a major concern. All jobs listed on the Apna platform are verified by Apna and free of cost for the candidates.
Founded by former Apple executive Nirmit Parikh, Apna operates as a LinkedIn for non-English speaking, non-affluent Indians. Users enter their name, age and skills to generate a virtual business card which is sent out to potential employers.
The start-up is building a scalable networking infrastructure to connect workers and employers, digitizing the process of searching for jobs, application, and the interaction between the employment and the candidate. It has the “potential to revolutionize the hiring process,” said Griffin Schroeder, a partner at Tiger Global, in a statement.
Apna has built the “market leading platform for India’s workforce to establish digital professional identity, network, access skills training, and find high quality jobs,” said Nikhil Sachdev, managing director, Insight Partners, in a statement, adding that employers were engaging with Apna at a rapid pace to help find high quality talent with low friction, which in turn led to the best in-class customer satisfaction scores.
The company has a presence in 14 cities across the country and is available in six languages. It has partnered with some of the leading public and private organizations of the country and is working with the Ministry of Minority Affairs of India, National Skill Development Corporation and UNICEF to provide better skilling and job opportunities to candidates.
Despite India suffering heavily from the COVID 19 pandemic, Apna has recorded a growth of nearly 50 times in the past 12 months, even as thousands have lost their jobs and others have shifted their businesses online.
“Things got very tough because of the pandemic and we’re helping millions get hired,” Parikh said.
Perhaps Apna’s most interesting feature is that it trains workers to gain skills necessary to succeed in the market and appear as prospective employees, practice with their interview performance, and become eligible for even more jobs. It offers nine training courses including classes in conversational English.
Mostly, it does what few people do -it encourages candidates when they fail to procure a job and helps them learn some particular skill to succeed in the next attempt. It has categorized 4,000 skills to date, and plans to launch career counselling in the future.
