Blue and grey-collar job portal WorkIndia has raised $12 million (Rs 98.4 crore) in a pre-Series B funding round from SBI Holdings, founding family of Nintendo, Yamauchi No.10 Family Office, Persol and Insitor.
“We plan to use the fresh funds to boost product and data science capabilities, besides foraying into the Southeast Asia’s blue-collar market,” said Kunal Patil, Co-founder and chief executive at WorkIndia.
Bengaluru-based WorkIndia was founded by Patil, Moiz Arsiwala and Nilesh Dungarwa in 2015. It provides a platform that offers employment opportunities across 50 categories like tele-calling, field sales executives, delivery partners, among others.
Currently, the firm has presence in 772 cities across 28 states and 8 union territories in India and claims to help about 100,000 Indians every month in finding suitable employment opportunities.
It had raised a $1.5 million (around Rs 11 crore) funding from venture debt firm BlackSoil in April last year. Prior to that, it had secured Rs 42 crore (approximately $5.89 million) from Xiaomi.
“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,” said Tomoyuki Nii, director of SBI Investment Co., the investment arm of SBI Holdings.
“This value proposition and the data-driven platform backed by the AI-based technology with the massive behavioral data gathered by WorkIndia were the key reasons for our investment".
“WorkIndia eliminates intermediaries and fraudulent jobs, building trust for both employers and employees, and ensuring a more inclusive and fair labor market. The deep technology built over the past 6 years utilizes geo-positioning, eligibility matching and behavioral data to suggest relevant jobs,” said Nicholas Lazos, co-founder of Insitor.