Insight, Tiger lead Series B for India jobs platform
Insight Partners and Tiger Global Management have led a $70 million Series B round for Apna, an Indian professional networking and jobs platform.
Existing investors, Sequoia Capital India, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Greenoaks Capital, and Rocketship VC also participated. It brings total investment to date to about $90 million and values the 16-month-old company at $570 million.
"We have been incredibly impressed with Apna's stellar growth over the last year,” Nikhil Sachdev, a managing director at Insight, said in a statement.
“They have built the market-leading platform for India's workforce to establish digital professional identity, network, access skills training, and find high-quality jobs. Employers are engaging with Apna at a rapid pace to help find high-quality talent with low friction which is leading to best-in-class customer satisfaction scores.”
Apna claims to be India’s largest platform of its kind, offering services across job sourcing, applications, employer-candidate interaction, and upskilling. The company uses an algorithm to match candidates with jobs based on skills and experience, which it says solves employer problems around trust, relevancy, and candidate volume.
The platform serves 10 million users and 100,000 employers, including Zomato, Burger King, Bharti-AXA Life Insurance, and Delhivery. In the past three months, the service has doubled its coverage to 14 cities India-wide. There are also partnerships with National Skill Development Corporation, UNICEF Yuwaah, and the Ministry of Minority Affairs of India.
Near-term plans for the latest funding include reinforcing the current footprint and expanding into new cities, reinvesting into the upskilling education offering, and hiring additional talent in engineering and product development. In the coming year, the company also plans to enter Southeast Asia and the US.
"At Apna we are determined to take a fresh approach towards solving employment and skilling challenges for billions,” Nirmit Parikh, Alpha’s founder and CEO, added. “Over the last month, Apna has facilitated more than 15 million job interviews and work-related conversations where users have helped each other to start a business, find a gig or learn a new skill.”
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