Job portal WorkIndia gets funding from Beenext

WorkIndia, a job portal for blue-collar workers, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Beenext, a Singapore-based early-stage technology fund.

The startup, owned and operated by Mumbai-based Eloquent Info Solutions Pvt Ltd, will use the funds to improve the technology for automating the employer-employee matching process, the company said in a statement.

Beenext co-founders Teruhide Sato and Dirk Van Quaquebeke said the company's focus on providing livelihoods at a mass scale and the balanced founding team composition between technology experience and business experience was the reason for the fund backing the startup.

WorkIndia offers blue-collared workers jobs in sectors such as tele-calling, retail and logistics through its mobile app. The company was started by Kunal Patil, a former investment banking executive and NYU Stern alumnus, and Ajay Kumar, a former real estate executive and IIM-Calcutta alumnus.

In October 2015, WorkIndia 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.

Other job portals that also target blue-collar workers are QuikrJobs, operated by Quikr Technologies Pvt. Ltd, and Bangalore-based Babajob Services Pvt Ltd, which runs the Babajob.com portal.

Beenext is a venture capital fund with a corpus of $60 million (about Rs 400 crore) targeting investments in early-stage companies in India, Southeast Asia, Japan and the US. It was established by Sato, founder and former CEO of Japanese e-commerce operator and investor Beenos Inc (formerly Netprice).

In February 2016, Beenext along with other investors put in $10 million in Series B funding in Bangalore-based NoBroker Technologies Solutions Pvt Ltd, which runs a peer-to-peer property listings business for renting homes under NoBroker.com.

The venture capital fund's other investments includes an infusion  of Rs 60 crore ($9 million) in a Series B funding round in Industrybuying.com, an online marketplace for industrial goods, along with Kalaari Capital and SAIF Partners.