Malavika Velayanikal · · 2 min readWhy are 3 Indian startup heroes lending their muscle to young mobile app Qyk?
Four-month-old mobile startup Qyk has bagged an undisclosed amount of seed funding from three cool Indian entrepreneurs, Abhishek Goyal, Zishaan Hayath, and Sahil Barua. Qyk helps users find and hire services like pest control, salsa lessons, and pet training as well as professionals like tax consultants, wedding photographers, and architects in their locality.
Qyk’s funding backers are all experienced players in internet startups. Goyal is the co-founder of funding deal discovery site Tracxn and fashion etailer UrbanTouch which was acquired by FashionAndYou in 2012. Earlier, he was an associate with Accel Partners. Hayath is the co-founder of Toppr, an online prep platform for entrance exams in India, and also runs an angel investment group called Powai Lake Ventures. He was one of the earliest investors in Ola and Housing, two of the hottest Indian startups. Barua is the CEO and co-founder of ecommerce enabler Delhivery, which also had Goyal as one of the early investors.
“The local services solutions market is ready to be disrupted and Qyk has a team with the vision and skill-set to do it. We need a mobile solution like this to help businesses grow and enable customers to find the right service providers,” says Hayath.
Qyk focuses on professional and business services. It offers users verified choices, enables users to compare the services, and comes up with competitive quotes to pick from.
This is very useful in a city like Bangalore where there is huge migrant population, who often don’t have a family network to fall back on for recommendations.
Professionals such as interior designers, chartered accountants, or physiotherapists who sign up on Qyk can receive requests for services and send quotes. They compete with one another to offer the best deals to get hired.
“There are two large plays in local services, one is on-demand and the other is reverse auction. The reverse-auction business model is largely a technology play. Team Qyk’s approach of solving this problem via a mobile first product and their experience in technology gives them a big advantage to be the market leader,” says Goyal.
The Qyk team: Deepak Singhal, Sangharsh Boudhh, Shobhit Singhal, and Anubhav Sahoo
Bangalore-based Qyk’s team of four consists of Deepak Singhal, Sangharsh Boudhh, Shobhit Singhal, and Anubhav Sahoo. All of them are alumni of Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) and have worked with startups like Ola, InMobi, and Practo earlier. “We feel that the timing is perfect to build a mobile first solution given the rapidly increasing smartphone penetration,” Singhal says.
Editing by Paul Bischoff
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