Inc42 Daily Brief
Stay Ahead With Daily News & Analysis on India’s Tech & Startup Economy
Mumbai-based, on-demand home services marketplace, Zimmber, has raised $2 Mn (about INR 12.8 Cr) from IDG ventures, Omidyar Network, Sherpalo Ventures and TV Mohandas Pai.
The startup plans to use the funds to add more categories on its platform, develop technology, expand its team and enter other tier I, II and III cities.
Founded in 2014 by Anubhab Goel, Gaurav Shrivastava and Amit Kumar, Zimmber is an online platform that provides on demand services to the users of Mumbai, Pune and Gurgaon presently. The startup provides services across nine categories including Home SPA, Laundry, AC servicing, Plumbing, Electrical Repair Services, Pest Control Services, Painting Services, Carpentry Services and arranging drivers.
The startup has plans to expand to 20 new categories and 37 new cities including NCR and Navi Mumbai by next year.
Zimmber claims to have about more than 400 service providers and servicing over 100 orders in a day.
According to Anubhab Goel, CEO and Co-Founder, Zimmber, “ We are growing in all 3 spaces viz city, category and product. As for our growth is concern we are growing 2X week on week and would want to carry on that trajectory for next few months.”
With around 69 startups founded in 2014 alone in this domain, the on demand service industry has seen a rapid rise. The opportunity in India is estimated to be as high as $4 Bn, which is set to explode as the ventures tap into the tier 2 and tier 3 cities in India.
According to a senior representative of Omidyar Network and Ranjith Menon, Executive Director at IDG Ventures India, the home services industry in India is highly fragmented, unorganized and non-standardized. Faster adoption of smartphones and the rise of on-demand economy has allowed players like Zimmber transform the lives of home service providers, while injecting greater price transparency, safety and better quality of service standards for consumers.
Prior to this the startup had raised $ 400,000 (around INR 2.5 Cr) from InMobi’s core founding team including Naveen Tewari and an undisclosed amount from a group of angel investors including Praveen Sinha of Jabong; Vivek Khemka of Egon Zender; Satyam Bansal of Flipkart and Alex Kuruvilla of Conde Nast. It also acqui-hired laundry service startup Dhulai.
Operating in the same domain are other players like LocalOye which recently raised $5 Mn from Tiger Global and Lightspeed Venture Partners, Housejoy that raised $4 Mn in Series A round from Matrix Partners, UrbanPro that received $2 Mn from Nirvana Ventures, and UrbanClap that received $10 Mn funding just today from SAIF Partners, Accel Partners.
Note: We at Inc42 take our ethics very seriously. More information about it can be found here.