Comments
LocalOye, a mobile marketplace for hiring local service professionals, has raised $5 million Series A funding from Tiger Global Management and Lightspeed Venture Partners.
Last year, it had raised a seed funding from some of the top angel investors including Sidharth Rao (Co-founder Webchutney), Haresh Chawla (ex-Group CEO Network 18 and India Value Fund partner), and Sachin Bhatia (co-founder, MakeMyTrip).
The company said in a statement today that it will use the funds to scale nationwide and expand to more service categories.
Founded in 2013 by Aditya Rao, a graduate from BITS Pilani, LocalOye, currently operates in Mumbai, offering services over 250 categories; including education (e.g. tutors), home services (e.g. appliance repairs), wellness (e.g. yoga, fitness) and events (e.g. photographers) among others.
“People spend money on two things – buying products or services. We want to completely own the services space. Over the past 1.5 years, we have solved some of the toughest local services problems, and now it is time to exponentially build on this momentum by continuing our focus on great execution, merchant quality and customer delight," Rao said.
The platform uses an advanced recommendation engine to connect customers with service professionals within a few minutes. Customers can give their requirement to the LocalOye app via easy steps; and on the other side the service professionals also use an app to review, accept, engage and schedule bookings with those customers.
The current solutions are heavily dependent on a classifieds approach, with hundreds of listings and manual phone calls, which is a really frustrating experience for customers. LocalOye’s match-making approach eliminates this, making it hassle free for the customers while providing 50x better conversion rates for service professionals. The LocalOye team does screening and personal verification of each service professional to ensure quality, assurance and fair pricing.
In the next few months, LocalOye would be investing heavily in technology and building the team.
“We do not want to build another classifieds company. LocalOye is highly interactive and data driven; and this is what makes our engine smarter every day. And we have also seen a huge demand from service professionals for better tools to manage their business”
For service professionals, LocalOye uses its in-house products and team to personally verify (aadhar card), background check (certifications, court records etc) and screen (quality, expertise etc) every member before they are on boarded to the platform.
Comments
COMMENT NOW
Comments
Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. They cannot be abusive or personal. Please abide by our community guidelines for posting your comments.
We have migrated to a new commenting platform. If you are already a registered user of TheHindu Businessline and logged in, you may continue to engage with our articles. If you do not have an account please register and login to post comments. Users can access their older comments by logging into their accounts on Vuukle.