Airtel, Shakti VC, Pioneer Fund (Y Combinator alumni fund), Spike Ventures (Stanford College alumni fund), Vijay Shekhar Sharma (CEO, Paytm), Guru Gowrappan (Group CEO, Verizon Media and former World MD, Alibaba), Kevin Shannon (former CFO, Harvard Administration Firm) and others additionally participated within the spherical.
Vahan has beforehand been backed by marquee names comparable to Y Combinator, Khosla Ventures, Founders Fund, Airtel and plenty of former and present Google and Flipkart executives.
The funding will assist the corporate additional scale up its recruitment enterprise and construct new product choices, a senior firm government mentioned.
Based in 2016 by Madhav Krishna, Vahan is a technology-driven platform that helps blue-collar staff discover jobs and employers, the fitting candidate.
“Now we have grown 10x throughout the pandemic, from inserting 600-700 folks every month to round 7,000 now,” Krishna informed ET.
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The startup has constructed instruments, together with an AI-driven bot on prompt messaging platform WhatsApp, which can be used to recruit staff at giant scale and save blue-collar staff from exploitation by the hands of middlemen, the corporate mentioned.
Vahan’s prospects embody main gig-economy corporations comparable to Zomato, Uber, Flipkart, Swiggy, Rapido, Grofers, Dunzo and Shadowfax.
“By way of our machine learning-based know-how, we’re capable of scale back employee attrition — an issue that plagues most employers that rent blue-collar staff — and enhance general employee productiveness,” Krishna added.
India has over 250 million blue-collar staff. Because of the sturdy tailwind from the Covid-19 pandemic, the very best demand for blue-collar staff is predicted from the logistics and e-commerce sectors as constructing environment friendly supply channels is essential for web companies. Employers on this phase rent blue-collar staff below a flexi-work or “gig” mannequin.
In accordance with a report by trade affiliation Assocham, India’s gig sector is predicted to develop at a Compounded Annual Progress Charge of 17% to $455 billion by 2024 and has the potential to develop not less than 2x in comparison with pre-pandemic estimates.
“The blue-collar employee recruitment alternative in India is giant and rising, and Vahan’s means to leverage know-how in constructing worth for each staff and employers at scale is thrilling,” mentioned Vinod Khosla, founder, Khosla Ventures.
