Unitus Seed Fund invests in operations crowdsourcing startup Awign

Awign Enterprises Pvt. Ltd, a Bengaluru-based operations and sales outsourcing startup, has raised Rs 5 crore ($784,500) from early-stage investor Unitus Seed Fund and other angel investors, a company statement said.

The startup will use the funds to fuel the next phase of its growth. It plans to expand its presence to 12,000 pin codes across India, partner with 100 corporates and startups, and tap into over 500,000 students, the statement added.

“We are currently operational in 130 cities in India and manage everything without ever physically visiting any city. We want to completely turn our service into product and influence career paths for a million students. The funds would be instrumental in both scaling our outreach and improving our product,” Gurpreet Singh, one of Awign’s co-founders, said.

Awign outsources those aspects of a business’s core operations and sales tasks that require a human workforce. The company converts these tasks into virtual internships and outsources them to the student network it has built. The firm trains college students through its online do-it-yourself platform and employs them as interns for the outsourced work. The Awign app helps the company track the progress of the interns.

The company charges the clients on the basis of the deliverables.

“Majority of business operations in India continue to be offline-driven, requiring high-intensity human intervention at all stages. Awign’s strong technology-enabled platform and a growing network of well-trained college temp workforce have successfully streamlined these operations, minimised turnaround time and completely eliminated setup and operation costs in multiple locations,” said Will Poole, co-founder and managing partner of Unitus Seed Fund.

The startup was founded in July 2016 by Annanya Sarthak and his friends from IIT Ropar, Gurpreet Singh and Praveen Sah. The firm competes with staffing firms TeamLease and Adecco.

The company claims that it has worked with over 20 clients across multiple sectors such as e-commerce, IT & ITeS, BFSI, FMCG, media and entertainment, infrastructure and logistics.

According to the firm, more than 5,000 students have completed an internship with Awign, earning an average stipend of Rs 6,000-7,000 per month. Nearly 50,000 students are currently registered on the platform.

In August last year, VCCircle had exclusively reported that Awign had raised about Rs 90 lakh ($140,000) from a clutch of angel investors.