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Mumbai-based home utility service provider Taskbob has acquired Zepper, another startup in the same domain for an undisclosed amount.
With this acquisition, Taskbob will mark its entry in Bangalore market.
Unlike other acquisitions in the market, this is a merger of ‘Assets Deal’, in which the acquiring company will absorb all the assets of the target company that the target ceases to exists.
Here, Taskbob gets the right to pick and choose between what they want to buy and what to leave behind in bad assets and liabilities. WIth this, Zepper will shut down its operations post acquisition.
Zepper was started in 2014 by Danish Arif, Akash Goel and Zia Arif. Presently, they have around 300 servicemen and 2,500 customers.
Confirming the news to Inc42, Aseem Khare, Taskbob’s founder and CEO said, “We are acquiring Zepper, but the terms of the deals are yet to be disclosed.”
He shared that Taskbob would absorb the contracted servicemen and the customers, but none of the Zepper employees would join on board. Besides, they are still discussing about the role of Zepper founders.
Based out of Powai (Mumbai), Taskbob, provides on-demand home services like cleaning, repair, driver, handyman-plumbers, carpenters and more. It was started in 2014 by IIT graduates Aseem Khare, Abhiroop Medhekar, Ajay Bhatt and Amit Chahalia.
Presently, Taskbob operates only in Mumbai and does 700 orders a day. With its expansion in Bangalore it aims to touch 1000 orders per day in next six to nine months.
As per industry experts, the home services industry in India has seen about 69 startups in this space, which were founded in 2014 alone. Out of which 15 startups raised roughly $25 Mn of investments from VCs. In April this year, Taskbob too had raised $1.2 Mn (INR 7.5 Cr) in seed funding from Orios Venture Partners and Mayfield Fund and is supposed to be in talks to raise another round soon.
However, these services pose a challenge of labour laws and contracted employees, the US-based Homejoy , which was in similar space had to close its doors in July, owing to lawsuits and other issues.
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