Hyperlocal lifestyle services marketplace FindYahan raises funding from The Phoenix Fund

Gurgaon-headquartered FindYahan India Pvt Ltd, which runs a location-based lifestyle services marketplace FindYahan, has raised an undisclosed amount in its second round of funding from The Phoenix Fund.

The funds will be used to grow the team and strengthen operations and technology for enhancing customer service and experience.

Founded in 2013 by Rachit Mathur and Snehil Khanor, FindYahan is a location based discovery platform for lifestyle services which connects skilled individuals and home businesses to their target customers.

"With the latest funds coming in, our core focus is further improving our product and consumer experience," said Rachit Mathur, CEO and co-founder, FindYahan.com.

It currently operates in Delhi/NCR and has over 1,00,000 users and claims to have over 4,000 supplies and over 50,000 downloads on Android. The firm's app on the Google Play Store, however, still shows download numbers in the 10,000-50,000 range.

"We are very excited to back promoters Rachit Mathur & Snehil Khanor and their team in this e-commerce segment which addresses a very real and ubiquitous customer need of finding good service providers for various services in a micro market," said Amit Khanna of The Phoenix Fund.

The categories of service providers listed on FindYahan include food service providers, domestic help, wellness and beauty service providers, tutors, event managers and business service providers.

Local services marketplace has become a hot vertical with a bunch of startups getting funding in quick succession. These include UrbanClap which just raised $1.6 million from SAIF, Accel and others; and LocalOye which raised $5 million from Tiger Global and Lightspeed. Previously, TaskBob raised $1.2 million (Rs 7.5 crore) in seed funding led by Orios Venture Partners with participation of Mayfield India and Near.in raised Rs 1.8 crore from investors, including Shaadi.com's Anupam Mittal and  Prashant Tandon (CEO) and Gaurav Agarwal (CTO) of Healthkart.com and Manish Vij of ad-tech firm SVG Media. Qyk also raised an undisclosed amount in angel funding from a group of investors, including Zishaan Hayath, co-founder, Toppr.com; Abhishek Goyal, co-founder, Tracxn.com; and Delhivery co-founder Sahil Barua, as per a company statement.

FindYahan itself had raised seed funding round led by Karan Bajwa, managing director, Microsoft India; Sunjay Kapur, managing director , Sona Koyo Steering; Amanpreet Bajaj, India head, Airbnb.com and Parvesh Kumar, managing director, Helios Packaging, just two months ago.

Till now, the fragmented and unorganised local services market was being served through local business listing such as Just Dial. In that model, users received phone numbers and also got direct calls from professionals after they posted their requirements.

The Phoenix Fund is a multi-asset private investment firm led by Amit Khanna. In the early-stage segment, it has backed ventures like Overcart, Hopscotch and Net2travel (which was later acquired by Indya.com, which in turn was snapped by Star TV).

It also has investments in PE, real estate and art as asset classes.

(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)