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Tag: Elevation Capital

  • India’s Snabbit valuation doubled to $180M in 5 months on its quick house-help bet | TechCrunch

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    India’s appetite for instant convenience — once confined to food and grocery delivery — is expanding into house help. That shift has helped Snabbit, an on-demand home-help startup, secure $30 million in new funding and lift its valuation to $180 million, up from $80 million five months ago.

    The all-equity Series C round — Snabbit’s third fundraise in nine months — was led by Bertelsmann India Investments, with participation from existing backers Lightspeed, Elevation Capital, and Nexus Venture Partners. The latest infusion brings the startup’s total funding to $55 million.

    Snabbit’s fresh funding follows a sharp rise in activity, with the Bengaluru-based startup growing from about 1,000 jobs a day in May to more than 10,000 daily bookings. The company crossed 300,000 total orders in October, founder and CEO Aayush Agarwal said in an interview with TechCrunch.

    Founded in 2024, Snabbit offers a range of on-demand home services for urban households, including cleaning, dishwashing, laundry, and kitchen prep through a 100% women-led fleet of 5,000 experts. The startup operates through a hyperlocal network of trained workers stationed around dense residential clusters, promising service within 10 minutes.

    Currently, Snabbit serves 40 micro markets across five major cities, namely Mumbai, Bengaluru, Gurugram, Noida, and Pune. It plans to expand its presence in these cities and enter Hyderabad, Chennai, Delhi, and Calcutta very soon, Agarwal told TechCrunch.

    Snabbit has served more than 300,000 customers, up from 25,000 in May, and expects to add another 100,000 as early as next month. Most of its users are between 30 and 40 years old, including bachelors and working professionals.

    Snabbit founder and CEO Aayush Agarwal with a few of its women expertsImage Credits:Snabbit

    Some of Snabbit’s customers are those who do not want full-time house help but prefer an ad hoc solution. “We’re basically taking inefficiency in the model and plugging that, rather than saying, ‘Hey, this was happening offline, and now we’ll do it online’,” said Agarwal.

    The startup reports a 30–35% retention rate and projects to reach annual recurring revenue of $11 million this month. Moreover, it has a customer acquisition cost of “well below” ₹500 (roughly $6), Agarwal told TechCrunch.

    Snabbit’s services are priced at around ₹150 (about $2) per hour, with an average ticket size of around ₹240 (roughly $3).

    Workers on the platform earn between ₹25,000–₹30,000 (approximately $284–$340) a month, depending on the hours they work. The startup has also reduced the average walking distance for its workers between two jobs from 300 meters to 250 meters, giving them more time to serve customers.

    Snabbit is not alone in the race to offer quick, on-demand home services in India. Urban Company pioneered the trend and was later followed by startups such as Broomees and Pronto. Urban Company now plans to double down on instant home services to stay ahead of rising competition, though Snabbit says it does not see that as a challenge.

    “In a hyper-local business, you don’t win pan India, you don’t win cities, you win micro markets. And today, out of the micro markets where we both [Snabbit and Urban Company] are present, Snabbit is leading in more micro markets because we have taken a very positive strategy to build depth as opposed to build breadth,” Agarwal said.

    The new funding will help Snabbit strengthen its presence and expand into high-frequency categories such as cooking, child care, and elderly care.

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    Jagmeet Singh

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  • India’s Urban Company soars 58% above IPO price in year’s most subscribed offering | TechCrunch

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    Urban Company, India’s largest home services platform, stormed onto the public markets on Wednesday, opening 58% above its issue price after delivering the country’s most subscribed IPO of the year.

    The Gurugram-based startup, which connects users to at-home services ranging from beauty treatments to appliance repair, debuted on the Mumbai-based National Stock Exchange at ₹162.25 per share (approximately $1.84), up from its IPO issue price of ₹103. The offering, which opened last week, was subscribed over 100 times, meaning investors placed orders for 100 times more shares than were available, signaling robust demand from both institutional and retail investors.

    Urban Company’s public listing has also served as a partial exit opportunity for its early backers, with Accel reaping the largest gains, followed by Elevation Capital and Tiger Global. Accel, which invested at an average cost of ₹3.61 per share, is sitting on potential profits of nearly 45x, while Elevation, with an entry price of ₹5.39 per share, stands to make around 30x and Tiger Global is looking at comparatively modest gains, reportedly around 1.3 times its cost basis.

    One of the key reasons behind Urban Company’s success over the past decade has been its ability to organize traditionally unorganized household services in India — including cleaning, plumbing, electrical work, massage, and beauty treatments. By digitizing these offerings through its app, the company has created an on-demand platform in a market that lacked standardization. In that sense, Urban Company enjoys a near monopoly, remaining the largest organized player in this space.

    Before kicking off the $217 million public offering, Urban Company raised $97 million from anchor investors, including Goldman Sachs, Dragoneer Investment Group, Norges Bank, GIC, Nomura Amundi Funds, Steadview Capital, Prosus, and WhiteOak. Domestic mutual funds including SBI Mutual Fund, ICICI Prudential, Nippon, and UTI also participated in the pre-IPO secondary round.

    Founded in November 2014 as UrbanClap by Abhiraj Singh Bhal, Varun Khaitan, and Raghav Chandra, Urban Company operates in 59 cities across four countries, including India, the UAE, Singapore, and Saudi Arabia — with India remaining its largest market so far. The company plans to enter more than 200 cities by the end of fiscal year 2030 to expand the reach of its household services.

    Urban Company aims to utilize the net proceeds primarily for technology development and cloud infrastructure, along with lease payments for office spaces and marketing initiatives.

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    Jagmeet Singh

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  • Elevation Capital leads $15 mn funding in ex-Partner’s AI-SaaS start-up Drivetrain

    Elevation Capital leads $15 mn funding in ex-Partner’s AI-SaaS start-up Drivetrain

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    Former Elevation Capital Partner Alok Goel’s enterprise SaaS start-up Drivetrain, which helps businesses monitor and scale growth, has raised $15 million in fresh funding. The round was led by Elevation Capital, Jungle Ventures, and Venture Highway, along with participation from 25+ angel investors, advisors, founders, and start-up CXOs. These included ex-Googler Amit Singhal, Notion Co-founder Akshay Kothari, Chargebee Co-founder Krish Subramanian, Fareye Co-founder Kushal Nahata, among others. Prior to this, the company had raised an undisclosed seed round last year. 

    Founded in April 2021 by Alok Goel, Tarkeshwar Thakur (ex-Freshworks) and Saurav Bhagat (former lead of SaaS investments at Elevation Capital), Drivetrain operates a financial planning, budget-tracking, and growth monitoring platform for tech businesses. It plans to use the funds for new product development, market expansion, and fresh hires. 

    Drivetrain Co-founder and CEO Alok Goel calls the platform a “Google Maps for business growth”. It has built an AI-powered language called DTML – Drivetrain Modeling Language – that is capable of expressing nuances of how a particular business operates. At present, the platform integrates with over 200 workplace collaboration software, including Salesforce, Netsuite, Quickbooks, Workday, and Looker, among others, and aids course correction for decision-makers at mid-market enterprises. 

    Drivetrain Co-founders Tarkeshwar Thakur, Alok Goel, and Saurav Bhagat

    “Many leaders manage their business plans and multimillion-dollar budgets on spreadsheets that are cumbersome and error-prone. Gauging your business health in real-time and applying course corrections is impossible on spreadsheets. Instead, with Drivetrain, you can make better, confident decisions in days, not months,” Goel explained. 

    Drivetrain is one among several SaaS start-ups that are leveraging AI to build innovative products for other businesses. The AI-SaaS segment is projected to create $500 billion in market value by 2030, according to a report by Stellaris Venture Partners and IFC (arm of the World Bank).

    Deepak Gaur, Partner at Elevation Capital, said, “Today, finance teams spend up to four weeks every quarter tracking key business metrics and generating reports for their stakeholders. You can’t make decisions on such stale data. Drivetrain enables these companies to consolidate their data and get insights in near real-time. This helps them focus more on forward-looking questions during board meetings.”

    Bengaluru-based Drivetrain’s AI-led software assists businesses in predicting revenue growth and weeding out business imperfections before it starts affecting their financials. “We have struggled to put together Excel sheets for portfolio companies to predict revenue growth, structure the go-to-market plan, and understand levers that would affect revenue and margin growth. Drivetrain’s scientific approach to scaling business predictably resonated with us,” Priya Mohan, Partner at Venture Highway, stated. 

    Also Read: Elevation Capital to write larger early-stage cheques with new fund

    Also Read: India’s AI-SaaS start-ups likely to employ 5 mn people by 2030: Study

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