India's Apna joins unicorn club 21 months after launch

Tiger Global Management led the round, with support from Owl Ventures, Insight Partners, Sequoia Capital India, Maverick Ventures, and GSV Ventures, Nirmit Parikh, Apna’s founder and CEO, said in a LinkedIn post. “In a short span of 21 months, we have touched 16 million lives through our app. And the story doesn’t stop here,” he added.

The investment comes three months after Insight and Tiger Global led a $70 million Series B at a valuation of $570 million. Sequoia and Lightspeed Partners India provided seed funding for Apna. They re-upped for an $8 million Series A in 2020 alongside Greenoaks Capital and Rocketship.vc. This was followed by a $12.5 million extension in March 2021 featuring all four investors.

Paytm Mall, the e-commerce arm of payments platform Paytm, became the first Indian start-up to achieve a $1 billion valuation within two years of inception. Since then, the likes of Ola Electric, a spinout from ride-hailing platform Ola, Glance, a content platform built by mobile advertising player inMobi, and Udaan, a B2B marketplace, claim to have got there as fast or faster.

Only one of these companies, Udaan, is a fully independent player. Its rise was linked to mobile carrier Jio rolling out national telecom infrastructure and offering low-cost data plans, which brought internet access to the mass market.

Explaining the sourcing process for Apna, Harshjit Sethi and Sidhant Goyal, a managing director and an investment analyst at Sequoia, made the same point. Employment and skills were a logical target when, in 2016, they began looking for start-ups that catered to the aspirations of those beyond India’s 10 million wealthy English-speaking households.

Three years later, they met Parikh and agreed to participate in a seed round seven months before he launched an early prototype in two Mumbai neighborhoods. The app went viral, and on closing the Series A, Apna had a few hundred thousand active users.

The company has since evolved into a job marketplace and professional networking platform with more than 16 million users and 150,000 business customers. In the past 15 months, it has grown 125-fold, facilitating 100 million interviews. In August alone, 18 million interviews took place.

The goal is to reach 250 million users and one million business customers by the end of 2022, while expanding from 28 cities to 300. Apna also wants to enter international markets.

Sethi and Goyal noted in a blog post that the company found success by developing a discovery platform aimed at the working class – a task that has proven beyond the scope of other start-ups. This was achieved by studying the target market and appreciating there was a demand for networking as well as just job ads.

“In early 2019, Nirmit spent many days at a manufacturing site in Ahmedabad, working undercover as a factory worker, so he could better understand this target audience at a deeper level – a level of dedication we have hardly seen,” they said.

In addition, Parikh demonstrated clarity of thought, which fed through into rapid execution, and proved an effective storyteller, fostering a belief in the concept. “We love the fact that his vision has stayed almost the same since the early days: a jobs and skills marketplace overlaid on a large and engaged community of India’s emerging working class,” Sethi and Goyal said.

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• Topics
• South Asia
• Technology
• Expansion
• India
• TMT
• Growth capital
• Sequoia Capital
• Tiger Global Management
• Greenoaks Capital
• Owl Ventures
• Insight Partners
• GSV Ventures
• Lightspeed Venture Partners