WorkIndia, a Bengaluru-headquartered blue-collar job portal, has raised $12 million U.S. in a pre-Series B funding round.
According to a report, the funding round saw participation from Tokyo-based SBI Holdings, the founding family of Nintendo, Persol Group, and Insitor Partners. In addition to product development, WorkIndia intends to channel the proceeds for expansion into Southeast Asia’s blue-collar markets.
“Under the situation where job seekers have to call employers over the phone to get a job in India, the filtration of the calls which makes every call meaningful is extremely crucial for both the job seekers and employers to save time and costs. WorkIndia’s unique relevance-matching system between job seekers’ skills and employers’ needs, based on full, partial, and waterfall matching, has done a phenomenal job in this respect,” said Tomoyuki Nii, director of SBI Investment Co. Ltd.
Last April, WorkIndia received an undisclosed sum from Persol Group for a deal that saw the former share its services and fraud-detection technology with the latter’s affiliates operating in 13 countries. Unlike typical search-and-discovery models, WorkIndia’s calling model is aimed at empowering blue-collar workers who are under-exposed to digital job-hunting.
Founded by Kunal Patil, Nilesh Dungarwal and Moiz Arsiwala in 2015, WorkIndia caters to 15 million job seekers and facilitates 3 million monthly candidate calls on average. Its existing investors include Xiaomi, Beenext, and Asuka Asset Management.