New Delhi, India, January 11, 2023: WorkIndia, India’s largest blue and grey-collar job portal, has raised $12 million in its Pre-Series B funding from SBI Holdings, Tokyo, Yamauchi No.10 Family Office, the founding family of Nintendo, Persol, and Insitor. The literacy level of blue-collar workers is usually low making them highly prone to Fraudulent jobs – one of the biggest challenges faced by workers in the Indian blue-collar segment.
WorkIndia, utilizing deep technology, not only administers and digitizes the employment process but also mitigates any margin of fraud in hiring. Its fraud detection technology is India’s most extensive fraud technology system that processes 9.8 million data parameters. It leverages a fully automated system rooted deep in dynamic algorithm-based hiring and geo-tagging which matches data demographically, evaluates eligibility, and observes behavior to suggest relevant jobs effectively.
WorkIndia pioneered the calling model, which today has become an industry standard with most large companies and start-ups in the blue-collar segment now using this calling model, introduced by WorkIndia in 2017.
Attrition is a major challenge faced by employers looking to hire blue-collar workers. A blue-collar worker spends more than 20% of his monthly income traveling to work. A critical driver to reducing attrition is providing close proximity jobs to blue-collar workers. Utilizing Centroid Relative Distancing, WorkIndia has built a technology system that significantly reduces traveling hassles for the workers thus reducing attrition for the employers. This proprietary system built in 2018 is today India’s largest geo-location-based technology system processing 400 million data events each month.
Tomoyuki Nii, Director of SBI Investment Co., Ltd, the investment arm of SBI Holdings Inc. listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in Japan says, “Under the situation where job seekers have to call employers over the phones 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 cost. 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. This value proposition and the data-driven platform backed by the AI-based technology with the massive behavioral data gathered by WorkIndia were the key reasons for our investment”.
According to Mr. Hirowaka Murakami, Chief Investment Officer of Yamauchi No.10 Family Office, the founding family of Nintendo, “Achieving rapid revenue growth while demonstrating high unit economics and a negative working capital model is no easy feat, and WorkIndia has consistently demonstrated this for over a year. We are honored to be a part of WorkIndia’s journey and look forward to supporting them as they expand rapidly in this wild west of a blue-collar segment”.
Commenting on the same, Nicholas Lazos, Co-Founder of Insitor, “WorkIndia eliminates intermediaries and fraudulent jobs, building trust for both employers and employees, and ensuring a more inclusive and fair labor market. The deep technology built over the past 6 years utilizes geo-positioning, eligibility matching and behavioral data to suggest relevant jobs. WorkIndia is not only boosting the economy and maintaining the demand and supply balance for job opportunities, but also creating a meaningful impact on the lives of blue and grey-collar individuals. We are excited to support WorkIndia in further consolidating its leadership position.
Kunal Patil, Co-founder, and CEO, WorkIndia said, “The blue-collar market has seen two phenomena viz. One, Penetration and Two, Adoption. From 2018 to 2020, rapid penetration of smartphones due to Reliance Jio, and from 2020 until today, the adoption of smartphone usage in the blue-collar workers’ daily lives driven by Covid. With the new round of funding, WorkIndia will further strengthen its product and data science capabilities including entry into the yet untapped Southeast Asian blue-collar market.”
WorkIndia has successfully empowered over 29 Million Indians with meaningful employment opportunities. The organization covers deep geography with 772 cities across 28 states & 8 union territories in India and empowers 100K Indians monthly by helping them find employment suiting their skillset. The platform caters to the hiring needs of over 1.5 Million SMBs and multiple large corporates.
