UrbanClap, a mobile marketplace for services ranging from the likes of house cleaning and beauty services at home to interior designing and wedding photography, said the value of monthly transactions on its platform has reached $10 million (Rs 66.6 crore).
The startup had achieved the mark in August, less than six months of its mobile app launch, making it one of the fastest growing Internet services companies in India. “We are receiving 2,000-3,000 customer requests every day and are able to connect 99% of the customers to the right professionals in less than half an hour,” said Varun Khaitan, cofounder of UrbanClap. The 27-year-old IIT-Kanpur graduate founded UrbanClap last year, along with former Twitter employee Raghav Chandra and IIM-Ahmedabad alumnus Abhiraj Bhal.
UrbanClap is experimenting with two service models. For standardised, blue-collar services like electric work or home cleaning, it directly picks the best available personnel. For services like photographers, interior designers or yoga instructors, it takes in the customer request and with an automated match-making algorithm gives a choice of sellers to the customer to pick from.
UrbanClap has 10,000 live professionals on the platform across four cities — Delhi-NCR, Mumbai, Bengaluru and Chennai. It is looking at going deeper into each of these cities and categories of services in the next two months before expanding to more cities.
It had raised $10 million from SAIF and Accel Partners in June. “UrbanClap has been able to scale supply without spending any money at all,” said Abhinav Chaturvedi, vice president at Accel Partners. The most interesting part is that engagement cohorts look great suggesting that the team has been able to scale up both demand and supply while maintaining a good balance.”
A majority of UrbanClap’s customers and service providers on the platform are women. According to the company, its transaction size is doubling every month.
An increasing number of services startups are aggregating handymen such as electricians and plumbers as well as caterers and tutors, stitching together a highly-fragmented market pegged at close to $100 billion in India. Other local funded players in this space include GoodService, Housejoy, LocalOye, Zimmber, Taskbob and Timesaverz.