This American gives new respect to India’s blue collar workers with funding

It was at Microsoft Research India about eight years ago that Sean Blagsvedt got the urge to invent new ways of using technology to positively impact the social and economic development of the world’s poorest four billion people. Research showed that the easiest way to get out of the poverty trap was income diversification. But jobseekers in this bracket can typically only obtain work through hearing about open positions via word-of-mouth. Obviously, this hasn’t been working out that well.

So Blagsvedt gave up his cushy job to help blue collar workers in India get jobs. A computer science grad, he spent some time experimenting with a village version of LinkedIn. But low-income workers of the world are often not literate. A lot of them don’t even have a mobile phone, let alone access to internet.

He did what was the easiest thing to do – provide a job for a missed call (wherein the jobseeker calls in for a position and then terminates the call – the service then gets back to him/her). His startup Babajob helps anyone in India to register their job profile with a free call and in a local language.

“Babajob can positively change the world and make it fairer for everyone. It can potentially provide all levels of job seekers with more job opportunities while efficiently helping employers find suitable employees,” says Blagsvedt .

Today Babajob announced it has raised US$10 million from Australia’s SEEK Limited, a global online employment marketplace. SEEK claims to provide jobs to 2.6 billion people across Australia, New Zealand, Southeast Asia, China, Brazil, Mexico, Bangladesh, and Africa.

This round precedes the series A round led by GrayGhost Ventures and Khosla Impact.

It is not clear if this investment is a prelude to an acquisition. Babajob says that SEEK has picked up a minority stake in the company.

“We share a similar vision with SEEK – that of using technology to help everyone especially those in emerging markets find better jobs,” says Blagsvedt.

The funding will be used for marketing and developing its mobile apps, as well as improving its telephony services.

The company mainly provides delivery staff, office helpers, drivers, cooks, maids, security guards, etc. to corporations. Through its employer solutions like RapidHire, Babajob drives inbound phone calls from screened candidates to employers in minutes.

It claims to have over 2.5 million listed job openings and 3 million job seekers.

“We only need to get a thousand times bigger before I’d say we’re done,” says Blagsvedt.

Another online hiring platform for blue collar workers is Aasaanjobs, which raised US$1.5M from Inventus Capital and IDG Ventures earlier this year. The Mumbai-based startup has offline verification centres where candidates come to enter data manually. However, the match making between clients and candidates is algorithm-based.