Vahan Nets $10 Mn To Bolster Its AI Play For Blue-Collar Workforce

AI-powered blue-collar recruitment platform Vahan.ai has raised $10 Mn (INR 83.7 Cr) in a Series B funding round led by existing backer Khosla Ventures. 

The round also saw participation from Y Combinator, Gaingels and Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma among others.

The latest round takes the startup’s cumulative funding to $18 Mn till date, including $8 Mn and an undisclosed amount raised in 2021 and 2019, respectively.

Vahan seeks to use the fresh money to develop its AI recruitment technology, which will support eight major Indian languages, including Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Marathi, Bangla and Gujarati.

Currently, Vahan’s AI recruiter conducts interviews in English and Hindi. However, within the next year, the platform will expand into other languages and various dialects, making it more inclusive.

The company’s founder and chief executive Madhav Krishna told Inc42 that this AI recruitment technology can talk to blue-collar candidates on the phone itself. It will match candidates with suitable jobs, explain job requirements, answer their questions, and assist with onboarding. 

A key feature of this technology will be its ability to operate in multiple languages, aiming to support at least eight major Indian languages and numerous dialects. 

Unlike existing solutions, Vahan.ai’s AI recruitment technology will use cutting-edge generative AI, including large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 and Gemini 1.5. 

The founder added that the AI is fine-tuned with data from Vahan.ai’s network of recruitment agencies, which generates more than 1 Lakh hours of call recordings. This data helps train the AI to recognise and respond to different regional accents and dialects, a feature that differentiates it from other recruitment technologies. 

Founded by Madhav Krishna in 2016, Vahan.ai uses artificial intelligence and WhatsApp’s API to automate the hiring of blue-collar workers. Currently, the company focuses on recruitment for delivery services, partnering with companies like Swiggy, Flipkart, Amazon, Zepto, Uber, and Rapido.

The company will also use the funds to expand into industries like manufacturing, logistics and retail, with plans to introduce additional services such as loans and upskilling opportunities to enhance blue-collar worker retention, per the founder.

The company claims to recruit 25,000 people a month across 480 towns in India and aims to increase this number to 100,000 placements per month by next year. By FY25, it plans to quadruple this number. “We want to reach at least 100,000 placements per month. Our long-term goal is to create earning opportunities for at least a billion people in India and beyond over the next 10 years.”

Currently, the company claims to have close to 10 Mn blue-collar workers registered on its platform.

This comes a day after the Ministry of Labour and Employment urged platform aggregators to register gig workers on the e-Shram portal to enhance their social security. The Centre has issued a Standard Operating Procedure detailing the responsibilities of aggregators, including worker registration and data updates. 

Meanwhile, the government has also been collaborating with select aggregators to complete API integration.

This also comes two weeks after labour and employment minister Mansukh Mandaviya said that companies employing gig and platform workers will be asked to take the lead in registering their workers on the e-Shram portal soon.