India-based blue-collar jobs portal WorkIndia has raised an undisclosed sum from Japanese human resource management company Persol Group.
As part of the funding, WorkIndia will share its services and fraud-detection technology with Persol’s affiliates operating in 13 countries, per a news release. Unlike typical search-and-discovery models, WorkIndia has pioneered a calling model, which is aimed at empowering blue-collar workers who are under-exposed to digital job hunting.
Founded in 2017, WorkIndia claims to have catered to 15 million job seekers and says it facilitates two million candidate calls monthly on average. Its website currently has 109,000 job listings from across 760 Indian cities. The latest undisclosed round led by Persol is its sixth funding round. The previous five rounds were led by Beenext, smartphone maker Xiaomi and Asuka Asset Management, among others.
“Persol’s technology and product team had multiple detailed conversations to truly understand WorkIndia’s technology and the backend core, and we came out highly impressed. We look forward to investing in WorkIndia throughout their future journey and supporting them financially as they progress towards this beautiful impact-driven journey,” said Shingo Ishida, partner at Persol Ventures.
WorkIndia co-founder Moiz Arsiwala said, “We have been immensely methodical in our approach, right from building a product-market fit, scale, and monetization to currently hitting high unit economics. With the necessary steps done and massive data collected (450 million data parameters by our proprietary matching jobs engine), we are ready to scale today. With their massive financial resources, Persol is a perfect partner for us at this stage.”
The funding coincides with a unique juncture in India’s largely unorganized blue-collar sector. Apna has been at the forefront of digitizing and organizing this sector, which is comprised of nearly 450 million workers. Considered the start-up to most quickly join the coveted unicorn club, Apna has posted 220% year-over-year growth in revenue for FY20-21. Another promising blue-collar portal, OLX’s WaahJobs, was recently acquired by BetterPlace.