Online Services Marketplace Continues To Get Investors’ Money; Increase In Competition With No Clear Winner

After food and fashion marketplace, online services marketplaces is the most sought after domain where startups and investors, both, are betting big. The rise of hyperlocal delivery model and on-demand service has raised bars with players like LocalOye, Near.in, Taskbob, Findyahan, UrbanClap, Qyk amongst others that have raised funds in the past few months.

Announcing today is another online services marketplace startup UrbanPro, which rebranded itself from online education marketplace ThinkVidya, has raised about $2 Mn (about INR 13 Cr.) from Nirvana Venture Advisors.

The startup that provides online services for hiring Service Professionals plans to infuse the funds in improving its sustainable platform and building more presence in the app-based mobile services.

Founded in 2012, by Rakesh Kalra, UrbanPro was rebranded to become a services marketplace last month. The startup used to offer services only in the education domain leveraging tutors and training institutes for students across middle to high school, graduation to post-graduation, competitive exam preparations and IT classes.

However, realizing the fact that pure studies are not going to help in complete development, UrbanPro urbanized its strategy. The pivoted model now connects professionals and consumers across a variety of fields like interior designing, event management, photography and health and wellness services. The service is currently available in all major cities across the country. It also connects users to those offering hobby classes for dance, music, cooking and arts among others and language classes.

Founder and CEO of UrbanPro, Rakesh Kalra said, “UrbanPro’s mission is to help people hire smartly. We believe that our service is going to become integral part of life, and we are all working very hard to make that a seamless and rewarding experience.  This funding is a great vote of confidence to our vision and stands as testimony on how the hyperlocal category is poised for a very dynamic period in India.”

How Does Urban Pro Work?

UrbanPro follows a three step approach:

• The user needs to post their requirement basis what facilities they are looking at.
• Then UrbanPro provides applications from the professionals based on the requirement.
• The users can then select the correct proficient as per their requirement

UrbanPro claims of more than three lakh professionals on its platform out of which 1.8 lakh of them are tutors, who were already a part of ThinkVidya. Additionally, UrbanPro has more than 40,000 training institutes registered altogether serving over five lakh consumers in cities like Bangalore, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Pune, Chennai, and NCR. It had previously raised angel funding in January 2014.

Commenting on the investment Rajan Mehra, Managing Director at Mumbai-based Nirvana Venture Advisors said, “UrbanPro’s depth in the education vertical, a highly experienced team, and the ability of the product and monetisation model to scale across verticals and cities is what got us excited.” UrbanPro is one such services marketplace player that is outreaching to pan-India.

Prior to this, Nirvana Ventures has invested $2 Mn in ecommerce Enabler, KartRocket along with 500 Startups & Beenos. The other investments of Nirvana include Housing.com, Zopper, Transerv, Remedinet, Games2win and Jombay.com.

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