Vahan raises $8 mn in round led by Khosla Ventures

Vahan a Bangalore based jobs and livelihood platform has raised $8 million in its series A round of funding led by Silicon Valley investor Khosla Ventures. Vahan is a technology driven platform which helps the blue-collar workers to find the jobs that match their skills. It also assists the employers in finding the right candidate at the right price, at the right place and at the right time. The freshly infused funds will be utilised to grow the team, scale the business and build new products.

Khosla Ventures had earlier invested an undisclosed sum in Vahan’s seed round. Along with Khosla ventures this round also saw participation from Airtel, Shakti VC (led by former google executive Keval Desai with Eric Schmidt and Michael Dell as LP’s) Pioneer fund, Spike ventures, Vijay Shekhar Sharma (CEO, Paytm) among others. Vahan has been previously backed by marquee names such as Y combinator, Founders fund and many former and current Google and Flipkart executives.

Vahan currently places 7000+ blue-collar workers across 200 cities every month in gig economy jobs and is on track to become India’s largest blue collar recruitment platform in the next year or so. Starting as a recruitment only business, Vahan has now built capabilities around end-to-end workforce management or staffing thereby providing a comprehensive solution to employers.

The startup has built tools, including an AI driven bot on WhatsApp helping to recruit workers at large scale and velocity to try and save them from exploitation by the middlemen.

After the fundraise founder and CEO of Vahan, Madhav Krishna said “We will continue to leverage our deep expertise in building large businesses using technology to take the company to next orbit of growth. Our goal is to ensure that previously underserved blue-collar workers get access to opportunities across jobs, financial services and upskilling. Our ambition is to make 1 billion placements over the next 10 years."

India coming off the pandemic has over 250 million blue collar workers. The highest demand for the blue-collar workforce is expected from the logistics and e-commerce sectors as building efficient delivery channels is important for online businesses. Vahan’s client list includes Zomato, Flipkart, Uber, Swiggy, Rapido and Grofers.

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