Blue-Collar Job Platform WorkIndia Raises $12 Mn Funding To Enter SEA Market

Blue and grey-collar job portal WorkIndia has raised $12 Mn in its Pre-Series B round from SBI Holdings based in Tokyo, Yamauchi No. 10 Family Office (Nintendo’s founding family), Persol and Insitor.

WorkIndia plans to use the incoming funding to strengthen its product and data science capabilities and enter into the Southeast Asian blue-collar job market.

Founded in 2015 by Kunal Patil, Nilesh Dungarwal and Moiz Arsiwala and backed by the likes of BEENEXT, Xiaomi, Asuka Asset Management and other angel investors, WorkIndia is a job discovery portal for all blue and grey-collar jobs. The startup provides jobs across 50 categories including telecalling, field sales executives and delivery partners.

WorkIndia claims to have placed more than 29 Mn Indians. The startup serves 772 cities across 28 states and 8 union territories and empowers 100K Indians monthly by helping them find employment suiting their skillset. The platform caters to the hiring needs of more than 1.5 Mn SMBs and multiple large corporates.

The startup has developed a fraud detection system that safeguards blue-collar workers so that they don’t fall prey to fraudulent job listings, while also digitising the employment process for the employer.

WorkIndia’s fraud detection technology processes 9.8 Mn data parameters and leverages a fully automated system based on algorithm-enabled hiring and geotagging, which matches data demographically, evaluates eligibility and observes behaviour to suggest relevant jobs effectively.

The geotagging also allows blue-collar workers looking for jobs via WorkIndia to find jobs closer to their locations to cut their travel expenses. Further, the startup provides support by using Centroid Relative Distancing, a proprietary system which processes 400 Mn data events each month.

Kunal Patil, cofounder and CEO of WorkIndia, said, “The blue-collar market has seen two phenomena, one, penetration and two, adoption. From 2018 to 2020, rapid penetration of smartphones due to Reliance Jio, and from 2020 until today, the adoption of smartphone usage in the blue-collar workers’ daily lives driven by Covid. With the new round of funding, WorkIndia will further strengthen its product and data science capabilities, including entry into the yet untapped Southeast Asian blue-collar market.”

Tomoyuki Nii, Director of SBI Investment Co., Ltd, the investment arm of SBI Holdings Inc., said that the startup relevance matching system between job seekers’ skills and employers’ needs, based on full, partial, and waterfall matching has been effective in this respect.

“This value proposition and the data-driven platform backed by the AI-based technology with the massive behavioural data gathered by WorkIndia were the key reasons for our investment,” Nii added.

India’s job discovery segment is full of competition, with the likes of Naukri.com, Indeed, LinkedIn and other players in the market. However, WorkIndia competes with Apna, another blue-collar recruitment startup, which is valued at $570 Mn and also operates in similar verticals as WorkIndia.