Part-time job platform TapChief raises funding from 500 Startups, AngelList India, others

Gig marketplace TapChief has raised $650,000 (around Rs 4.5 crore) from more than 50 investors including 500 Startups, AngelList India, Stanford Angels, and SucSeed Venture Partners.

The round also saw existing investors Paytm, NuVentures and TaxiForSure co-founder Aprameya Radhakrishna, besides new angel investors including Freecharge co-founder Kunal Shah, former Flipkart people chief Mekin Maheshwari, SlideShare co-founder Amit Ranjan and Satyen V Kothari co-founder of Citrus Pay and founder of Cube Wealth.

Vijay Shekhar Sharma, founder of Paytm, which backed TapChief in this funding, said, “Businesses need a trusted way to engage with high-quality talent and … curating and managing the entire lifecycle through technology and a community of professionals is a winning proposition to all stakeholders in a rapidly changing business environment…”

Shashank Murali, co-founder and chief executive of TapChief, said that the funds will be used to expand the team and accelerate product development. Besides, the company looks to onboard a million professionals and facilitate over $10 million in earnings during this year.

TapChief

Pilani Experts Technology Labs Pvt. Ltd, which owns TapChief, was founded by BITS-Pilani alumni Murali, Binay Krishna Shivam, and Arjun Krishna Vasisht, in 2016. It started off an advisory platform for gig jobs and pivoted to its current form in 2017, as part of which TapChief connects professionals looking for gigs with companies in business areas that include tech, content, design and data science. It helps professionals from job discovery to payments stage. The gig durations range from an hour to six months, depending on the nature of the job.

The startup, which has more than 75,000 professionals on its network, claims to have facilitated $1 million in earnings through more than 20,000 gigs.

“An increasing number of highly-skilled professionals want the freedom to work on challenging problems and teams without a full-time job. We are de-risking the concept of remote independent work by creating thousands of ‘solopreneurs’ who help businesses achieve key objectives everyday…” Murali added.

TapChief says it works with a mix of companies that include Unilever, Deloitte, RedBus, UpGrad and Dunzo.