After LocalOye, India’s services marketplace UrbanClap gets $1.6M to go multi-city

After the consolidation of India’s online product marketplaces, most marquee early stage funds have lined up to bet on those specific to services. The latest one is UrbanClap which today announced US$1.6 million in funding from Flipkart backer Accel Partners, SAIF Partners, and Snapdeal founders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal.

“Being early investors in product ecommerce in India, we believe in the power of a marketplace for services,” says Subrata Mitra, partner at Accel India. “We picked UrbanClap because it solves the problem of local services with smartphone-based reverse auction or booking solution as opposed to a classifieds list. The level of engagement of providers is very high, which is a key ingredient to the success of any marketplace.”

The company, currently serving Delhi-NCR, plans to invest the funds in strengthening its technology and team, while scaling the platform to more service categories and cities. Some of the services it currently provides include plumbing, wedding photography, yoga classes, interior design, and so on.

“The platform is already making thousands of successful connections every week and with the backing of our investors, we plan to scale the platform across hundreds of services and multiple cities,” said UrbanClap co-founder Raghav Chandra, an engineer. He founded the six-month-old startup along with IIT-ians Varun Khaitan and Abhiraj Bhal.

Heating up

Just yesterday, Mumbai-based rival LocalOye raised US$5 million in series A funding from Tiger Global Management and Lightspeed Venture Partners, while Taskbob raised US$1.2 million from Orios Venture Partners and Mayfield. Earlier, another competitor in the city, Zimmber, raised funding from a group of angel investors.

All these service marketplaces are competing with Rocket Internet-backed German venture Helpling, which recently secured US$17 million in its Series A round of funding.

Most of these players are going mobile-only. Flipkart-owned online fashion Myntra store is also reportedly going mobile starting next month.