Why investors are pouring millions into Uber-esque apps for household jobs in India

In India, the cost of hiring household services is far lower than in developed countries. Large swathes of the urban middle class are accustomed to hiring chauffeurs, cooks, and maids on a daily basis. A common living room whining point is about a tardy maid, a cook not turning up, or a driver siphoning off petrol from a car. On the other side of the coin, many of the workers are exploited or ill-treated by employers with a feudal mindset.

Lately, a number of tech startups have come up to address such problems in this huge, disorganized home services market. For employers, they make the hiring of drivers, plumbers, or cleaning personnel secure, reliable, and simpler. And for workers, such portals provide more and better options – on a part-time or full-time basis.

Gurgaon-based WorkHorse is the latest such home services-on-demand startup in India. It has an Uberesque app – both on iOS and Android – that lets you hire drivers, beauticians, maids, and handymen for other home services.

Currently on a trial mode in Mumbai, WorkHorse announced its first round of funding today. It hasn’t disclosed the investors or the amount it raised. According to Kamallendu Singh, founder and head of business for WorkHorse, the funding came from high net-worth individuals based in Mumbai and Delhi, and it will be used to scale up operations to the National Capital Region (NCR) soon.

The company recently ran an ad campaign on print media to lure some early customers, urging them to try out the app, give feedback, and help WorkHorse tweak their offerings accordingly. “We are happy with the initial response that our trial has generated. We are scaling up our operation and adding more taskers every day. We aim to reach over 500 bookings a day in the next few months,” Singh says.

Big problem, crowded space

A similar app is six-month-old Qyk. It 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. Two months ago, it bagged an undisclosed amount of seed funding from three Indian entrepreneurs-cum-angels, Abhishek Goyal, Zishaan Hayath, and Sahil Barua.

Marketplace for household services LocalOye too recently raised US$5 million in series A funding from Tiger Global Management and Lightspeed Venture Partners. The two-year-old startup, operating in Mumbai, claims to have serviced over 100,000 customers.

The pioneer in this space is Bangalore-based Babajob, which tackled the problem from the other end – finding jobs for the urban poor. Technologist Sean Blagsvedt, who co-ran the Advanced Development and Prototyping Team at Microsoft Research India, founded the startup in 2007 as “the village version LinkedIn.com.” Currently, it has over 500,000 registered job seekers and 60,000 employers across all Indian states. Last month, it raised US$10 million from Australia’s SEEK Limited, a global online employment marketplace.

Besides broad-based apps and sites like Babajob, LocalOye, and WorkHorse, there are also narrower ones like GetMyPeon, Pathdoor, and TaskBob. GetMyPeon helps you find a tasker to run errands on the lines of TaskRabbit in the US. Bangalore-based Pathdoor brings pathology services to a patient’s doorstep. TaskBob helps you find handymen to fix household appliances on demand.