WorkIndia, a blue and grey collar job platform has raised $12 million (about INR 98 crore) in its pre-Series B round led by SBI Holdings, Tokyo, with participation from Yamauchi No.10 Family Office, the founding family of Nintendo, Persol, and Insitor. The Bengaluru-based company plans to utilize the funds to strengthen its product and data science capabilities including entry into the yet untapped Southeast Asian blue-collar market, a press statement said.
Co-founded by Kunal Patil, Nilesh Dungarwal, and Moiz Arsiwala, WorkIndia offers employment opportunities across 50 categories like tele-calling, field sales executives, and delivery partners, among others. Driven by technology, the platform has built a recruitment ecosystem that eliminates middlemen, fraudulent jobs, and vulgar jobs, providing job seekers with a platform they can trust when it comes to finding genuine job opportunities.
WorkIndia aims to mitigate this fraud in hiring as much as possible. Its fraud detection technology processes 9.8 million data parameters and leverages a fully automated system rooted deep in dynamic algorithm-based hiring and geo-tagging which matches data demographically, evaluates eligibility, and observes behaviour to suggest relevant jobs effectively.
Commenting on the investment, Co-founder & CEO of WorkIndia, Kunal Patil, said:
With the new round of funding, WorkIndia will further strengthen its product and data science capabilities including entry into the yet untapped Southeast Asian blue-collar market.
The startup claims to have spread across 772 cities, 28 states, and 8 union territories in India. It caters to the critical hiring needs of over 1.5 million SMBs and multiple large corporations. With over 1.87 lakh job listings, it also claims to empower 100k Indians monthly by helping them find meaningful jobs.
Director of SBI Investment, the investment arm of SBI Holdings Inc. listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in Japan, Tomoyuki Nii, added:
Under the situation where job seekers have to call employers over the phones to get a job in India, the filtration of the calls which makes every call meaningful is extremely crucial for both the job seekers and employers to save time and cost. WorkIndia’s unique relevance matching system between job seekers’ skills and employers’ needs, based on full, partial, and waterfall matching has done a phenomenal job in this respect. This value proposition and the data-driven platform backed by the AI-based technology with the massive behavioural data gathered by WorkIndia were the key reasons for our investment.
The primary vision of WorkIndia is to provide employment opportunities to blue-collar individuals in India. It aims to elevate the current accessibility of job offers for such individuals.
Adding further about the fundraising, Chief Investment Officer, Yamauchi No.10 Family Office, Hirowaka Murakami, said:
Achieving rapid revenue growth while demonstrating high unit economics and a negative working capital model is no easy feat. WorkIndia has consistently demonstrated this for over a year. We are honoured to be a part of WorkIndia’s journey and look forward to supporting them as they expand rapidly in this wild west of a blue-collar segment.
Last year in April, WorkIndia had raised an undisclosed amount in a funding round led by PERSOL Group, a major comprehensive human resources service provider in the APAC region. Prior to that, the firm had raised INR 42 crore from Chinese tech major Xiaomi. Angel investors like Satyen Kothari (Founder, Citrus Pay), Vikram Limaye (MD and CEO of National Stock Exchange) and Keshav Sanghi (founder Ventureworks Investment) also invested in WorkIndia.
