LocalOye wants to make access to household services easy in India with $5M in its kitty

LocalOye, India’s marketplace for household services, has raised US$5 million in series A funding from Tiger Global Management and Lightspeed Venture Partners. It had earlier raised an undisclosed amount in seed funding from a group of angel investors.

The startup helps users discover and book professionals for services such as plumber, electrician, yoga teacher or even nanny. The platform uses a recommendation engine to connect customers with service professionals within a few minutes.

The service providers are verified with the company. They are given access to a merchant-facing app which can be used to review orders and accept them. The app can also be used to schedule bookings with customers.

The two-year-old startup has onboarded about 10,000 vendors and serviced over 100,000 customers in Mumbai. It focuses on home maintenance, wellness, and events segments. They will scale nationwide with fresh funding and also add new categories of professionals.

“Indians were heavily dependent on classifieds sites, which have hundreds of listings. LocalOye brings a disruptive experience to the classifieds and yellow pages market that has not seen innovation in a decade,” says Dev Khare, managing director of Lightspeed India.

Another heavily funded startup providing similar service is Rocket Internet-backed German on-demand home services venture, Helpling, which had recently secured US$17 million in its Series A round of funding. Other homegrown funded startup in the same space is angel investors-backed Zimmber.