US- and Noida-based SquadRun Inc., which offers a mobile marketplace for crowdsourced work, has raised an undisclosed amount in seed funding from a group of angel investors including Amit Ranjan of SlideShare; Deepinder Goyal of Zomato; and Girish Khera of Scientific Animations, according to a top executive of the company. The round also saw participation from angel investors of Powai Lake Ventures including Zishaan Hayath, founder, Toppr.
The fund will be used for marketing, product development and expanding the startups’ presence in the US and Europe.
“We are processing about 10,000 data items per day and aim to increase this to 500,000 by the end of the year,” said Apurv Agrawal, co-founder, SquadRun.
The company was founded about six months ago by engineers Agrawal and Vikas Gulati, and commerce graduate Kanika Jain. Agrawal and Kanika were previously working at 91springboard, while Gulati has worked at Josh Technology.
SquadRun is an app that engages with users in their spare time to complete simple tasks and provide businesses with cost effective solutions to common operational problems. Its missions do not require the players to have any specific background or education, but they need basic skills like comprehension, pattern recognition, data handling and grammar, etc.
“Crowdsourcing can efficiently solve several problems for businesses. For example, an ecommerce marketplace uses SquadRun’s army for curation of content uploaded by sellers; moderation of user generated product reviews; audit of their customer support conversations; user experience testing of their product features; as well as generation of relevant tags for products to improve search relevance,” said Agrawal.
“SquadRun allows companies to break down core competence to a task level, re-evaluate, and crowdsource individual tasks that require intelligence but not experience or training,” added Khera.
The firm claims to have worked with over 7,000 users and about 35 businesses including Snapdeal, Groupon and TouchTalent. As of now, the firm is focused on data enrichment use cases such as data moderation, comparison, categorisation and tagging. It charges 25 per cent of the transaction value as its fee.
The startup was accelerated by Delhi-based startup incubator 91springboard.
(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)
