Leading mobile player LocalOye has raised $5 million (Rs.31 crore) from Tiger Global Management and Lightspeed Venture Partners to expand hiring service professionals.
"We will use the money from the A series funding to extend our presence in other cities across the country and expand our service portfolio," the Mumbai-based company said in a statement here.
The mobile platform offers its services to over 250 categories, including education (tutors), home services (appliance repairs), wellness (yoga, fitness) and events (photography).
The local service professionals market is estimated to be about $100 billion.
"Our platform uses an advanced recommendation engine to connect customers with service professionals at the earliest. Customers can give their requirement to our app (application), while service professionals use the app to review, accept, engage and schedule bookings," start-up founder Aditya Rao said.
As the present solutions are dependent on a classified approach, with hundreds of listings and manual phone calls, our match-making process eliminates delay and makes it hassle-free for customers while providing 50 times better conversion rates for service professionals.
Also Read
"Our team does screening and personal verification of each professional to ensure quality, assurance and fair pricing," Rao asserted.
As people spend money on buying products or services, the company wants to own the service space and solve some of the toughest local services problems."LocalOye brings a disruptive experience to the classifieds and yellow pages market, which have not seen innovation in a decade. We saw a clarity of vision and execution in its team," Lightspeed managing director Dev Khare said.
The two-year-old start-up raised an unspecified amount from seed round of funding in 2014 from angel investors, including Webchutney co-founder Sidharth Rao, former Network 18 chief executive and India Value Fund Partner Haresh Chawla and MakeMyTrip co-founder Sachin Bhatia.
"As LocalOye's vision to bridge the online-to-offline services market is compelling for both consumers and businesses, we support its expansion," Tiger partner Lee Fixel said in the statement.
Interactive and data driven, the company's platform has seen huge demand from service professionals for better tools to manage their business.
"Before hiring professionals, we use in-house products and teams to verify (Aadhar card), background check (certifications, court records) and screen every member before they are on boarded the platform," Rao added.