Housejoy buys Orobind. But will consolidation solve the problem of home services in India?

Photo credit: Leong Him Woh.

Home services, like food delivery, is a space with immense potential in India. There’s a growing market with rising incomes in urban households, and there’s an abundance of low-cost workers, from plumbers to fitness trainers.

Dozens of aggregators have cropped up to connect the consumers and providers of a whole range of home services. But, like food delivery, quality assurance is the stumbling block that’s tripped up many of them.

It is in this milieu that the better funded ones among them have made a move in recent months to take pole position by gobbling up smaller, niche players.

Today, Housejoy, which recently closed a US$23 million funding round led by Amazon, announced the acquisition of Orobind, which provides fitness trainers on demand at home.

Orobind has been a leader in its space, with over 1,000 customers in Bangalore and around 135 active personal trainers on its platform. Though the size of the deal with Housejoy hasn’t been revealed, the Amazon-backed home services company has acquired the trainers of Orobind, its customer base, and also the technology. The entire Orobind team will also be moving to Housejoy.

“Being entrepreneurs, it is a proud moment for us that we built a tech company from scratch and took it to a level where a larger and reputed player like Housejoy could come and find value in it,” Satya says.

See: How he got from surviving on half a dollar a day to getting his startup acquired

The quality question

Fitness is one of the 14 categories of home services provided by Housejoy.

The trouble with Housejoy, and other such on-demand apps, is that they have to both scale up rapidly to dominate their space and at the same time do the painstaking curation to ensure that the service providers they list are reliable. My own home cleaning experience with Housejoy in Bangalore was a nightmare.

Admittedly, that was before its US$23 million funding round by Vertex Ventures, Qualcomm, and Ru-Net Technology Partners, apart from Amazon and existing investor Matrix Partners. But the funding has only built up pressure to expand and scale up even faster – so it’s not clear how the onboarding of tens of thousands of service providers across a large country can make it any easier for Housejoy to ensure the quality of services.

One way out of the quandary is inorganic growth. Enter Orobind and the 135 active fitness trainers on its platform, who will now become a part of Housejoy post-acquisition. “The acquisition is part of our strategy to become a leader in this category with high repeat order rates,” says Saran Chatterjee, CEO of Housejoy.

Housejoy founders Arjun Mendu and Sunil Goel with CEO Saran Chatterjee. Photo credit: Housejoy.