Vahan, a Bangalore, India-based jobs & livelihood platform for blue-collar workers, raised USD 8m in series A funding.
The round was led by Khosla Ventures with participation from Airtel, SHAKTI VC (led by former Google exec Keval Desai with Eric Schmidt and Michael Dell as LPs), Pioneer Fund (Y Combinator alumni fund), Spike Ventures (Stanford University alumni fund), Vijay Shekhar Sharma (CEO, Paytm), Guru Gowrappan (Group CEO, Verizon Media and former Global MD, Alibaba), Kevin Shannon (former CFO, Harvard Management Company) and others.
The company intends to use the funds to further scale its recruitment business and build new product offerings for its customer base which comprises gig-economy companies and blue-collar workers.
Led by Madhav Krishna, Founder and CEO, Vahan provides a technology-driven platform for blue-collar workers to find jobs while helping employers find the right candidate. The startup has built tools, including an AI-driven bot on WhatsApp, that are used to recruit workers at large scale and at speed and save blue-collar workers from middlemen’s exploitation.
Vahan currently places 7000+ blue-collar workers across 200 cities every month in gig-economy jobs. Customers include leading gig-economy companies such as Zomato, Uber, Flipkart, Swiggy, Rapido, Grofer’s, Dunzo and Shadowfax.
FinSMEs
15/09/2021