Services marketplace UrbanClap has raised an undisclosed amount in funding from Ratan Tata in his personal capacity. This comes less than a month after the startup raised Rs 165 crore from Bessemer Venture Partners and existing investors Accel Partners and SAIF.
At the time UrbanClap had said it would use the funds for geographical and category expansion; 25 cities and 100 categories in the next one year. It said it would also double its employee count and acquire other companies. Note that UrbanClap had also raised $10 million in a round of funding from existing investors in June and raised seed funding of around $1.5 million (Rs 10 crore) in April.
UrbanClap claims to serve 5,000 customer requests daily, and has a seller base of over 25,000 professionals. It is currently operational in Bangalore, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Chennai, Pune and Delhi NCR and is hiring across product, marketing, engineering and business development. Founded by Varun Khaitan, Raghav Chandra and Abhiraj Bhal in October 2014, UrbanClap provides professionals for over 75 services, including plumbing, wedding photography, music lessons, yoga classes and interior designing.
Ratan Tata investments: Tata has invested in over a dozen startups over the last year or so in his personal capacity, although the amount has never been disclosed. These include startups from varying fields including Holachef, predictive analytics firm Infinite Analytics, YourStory, Lybrate, Ola, women’s fashion portal Kaaryah and Paytm. He had also joined the venture capital firm Kalaari Capital in an advisory role in February this year. Full list of his investments.
Developments in the services marketplace sector:
– Last month, services marketplace LocalOye laid off 60 employees mostly from its call servicing unit to focus on automating the entire process of hiring service professionals.
– The same month, online services provider UrbanPro launched a Q&A feature that let users inquire about the skill set and education of the experts listed on the platform.
– Taskbob, a Mumbai-based on-demand home and services startup, acquired Bangalore based Zepper, for an undisclosed amount in November. In April, TaskBob had raised $1.2 million in funding.
– In August, Timesaverz, a marketplace for on demand home services, raised Series A funding worth $2.2 million from Unilazer Ventures.
– In July, Zimmber, a hyperlocal home solutions company, raised pre Series A funding worth $2 million from IDG ventures and Omidyar Networks, with participation from other investors.
– In June, Goodservice, a 24 hour chat-based concierge app, raised seed funding worth $1.6 million from Sequoia Capital.
– In January this year, Gurgaon-based Near.in raised Rs 1.8 crore from a series of individual investors. The platform was launched by Wirkle co-founder Sunil Goyal, Lomesh Dutta & Akshay Khanna, offers service providers across various categories.
