‘Uber for consulting’ raises $500k, launches in Singapore

Need a subject matter expert to help you on your project, but don’t have the budget for a full-time hire? That’s a problem ExpertDB, which bills itself as an Uber for consulting, wants to solve.

The Singapore-based company is a marketplace that lets anyone discover and hire top-level consultants for calls or projects across different industries such as manufacturing, sales and distribution, marketing and PR, legal, IT, and big data. After raising US$500,000 in seed funding from unnamed investors, the company launches in 150 countries today.

ExpertDB uses algorithms to match experts with client postings and has a messaging feature that lets both parties vet the project fit for free and come to an agreement on the specifics like hourly rate and timelines. Experts then simply track their billable hours via the platform’s submission log. After each project, clients are asked to review and rate the experts to ensure the quality of services in the marketplace.

“During our private beta, we were working with Fortune 1000 companies and top management consulting and private equity firms who were hiring experts in our marketplace across an amazing array of topics. Managers and investment professionals at these firms were hiring experts to do everything – from solving engineering and data science problems to providing industry insights or driving small M&A deals,” says founder Phalgun Raju.

ExpertDB founder Phalgun Raju.

Phalgun got the idea for the startup after her stints as a senior technology exec at InMobi, Google, and Nokia. “Having run many businesses over the years, my teams and I regularly needed to speak to experts really deeply on a particular topic to better inform our decision-making or to understand industry best practices and to get some work done,” she recalls.

“But finding the right expert efficiently was next to impossible and is a very inefficient word-of-mouth process. Expensive alternatives out there such as large consulting firms or traditional expert networks charge rates that are well beyond the reach of typical company budgets and usually lack transparency or detailed quality signals,” she adds.

For experts, the value lies in being able to work when, where, and how they want and for the price they want. Phalgun explains the US alone has well over one million consultants, including professionals who recently left the workforce for flexibility. “This is the future of work,” she says.

ExpertDB’s roster of experts now includes an “innovator” in mesh networking who was featured in MIT Technology Review’s “Innovators Under 35” list, the former head of advanced analytics at McKinsey, and other prominent senior business executives.

The company doesn’t charge clients commission or subscription fees, but takes a 10 percent cut of what experts charge for projects.

Phalgun refuses to disclose transaction volume on the site, but she says it’s “growing very quickly.”

“The key metric we love is that 95 percent of projects in our system have high-quality expert matches within 48 hours,” she says.