WorkIndia raises $500K from Satyen Kothari and others

Mumbai-based Eloquent Info Solutions Pvt Ltd, which runs job portal for blue-collar workers WorkIndia, has raised $500,000 (Rs 3.25 crore) in a pre-Series A funding round led by Citrus Pay founder Satyen Kothari.

Keshav Sanghi, founder of VentureWorks India; Riddhesh Gandhi, founder of Discover Capital; and some senior executives at multinational banks also put in money.

The company will use the funds to improve its product and rope in more customers, it said in a statement.

Besides WorkIndia, a few other companies have started job portals for blue-collar workers and raised funding. Online classifieds firm Quikr, owned by Quikr Technologies Pvt. Ltd, last month launched a job search platform named QuikrJobs for blue- and grey-collar workers.

In April, Bangalore-based Babajob Services Pvt Ltd, which runs job portal Babajob.com, raised $10 million from Australian company SEEK Ltd. In 2012, it had secured Series A funding of Rs 3.5 crore ($600,000 then) from social venture investment firm Gray Ghost Ventures and Silicon Valley veteran Vinod Khosla, among other investors.

WorkIndia connects grey- and blue-collar employees directly with employers through its mobile app. Bulk of the jobs listed by the company fall into the category of tele-calling, retail and logistics segments. The company charges a fixed commission from the employers for every hire they make through the WorkIndia app.

The Android app has around 13,500 downloads since its launch in July 2015. WorkIndia currently operates only in Mumbai but plans to expand to three to four metro cities in the next six months.

Kunal Patil and Ajay Kumar, co-founders of WorkIndia, said that the blue- and grey-collar segment behaves differently from the white-collar when it comes to recruiting and that their team spent three to four months to understand this segment's behaviour.

Patil and Kumar founded the company along with four others in February this year. Kumar is an MBA from IIM Calcutta and has 10 years of experience in private equity and finance in financial institutions such as IDFC and ICICI Bank. Patil is an MBA from NYU, Stern School of Business and has worked with Monitor Group (Strategy) and Merrill Lynch Investment Banking in Mumbai and New York.