Crossing 50k downloads, FindYahan raises second round of funding from the Phoenix Fund
Hyperlocal is the flavour of the season. FindYahan, a hyper local marketplace for services has raised its second round of funding from The Phoenix Fund. FindYahan has created a platform that connects skilled individuals and home businesses to their target customers. The funds raised will be used to further grow the team and strengthen operations and technology for enhancing customer service & experience.
FindYahan was founded in late 2013 by Rachit Mathur and Snehil Khanor, currently operates in Delhi/NCR and has over 1,00,000 users, over 4,000 supplies and 50,000+ downloads on the Google Play Store. The Phoenix Fund is a multi-asset class fund which has invested in startups like Overcart and Hopscotch. The Phoenix Fund is coming in as a sole Investor in this round of funding for FindYahan. The company had earlier raised a seed round led by Karan Bajwa - MD Microsoft India, Sunjay Kapur - MD Sona Koyo Steering, Amanpreet Bajaj - India Head Airbnb.com and Parvesh Kumar - MD Helios Packaging Pvt Ltd.
“We are very excited to back the excellent promoters Rachit Mathur & Snehil Khanor and their team in this e-commerce segment which addresses a very real and ubiquitous customer need of finding a good service provider for various services in a micro market. FindYahan not only connects the customer and the service provider but also tracks the customer experience and feedback,” says Amit Khanna of The Phoenix Fund. FindYahan claims to have trippled the amount of requests they process in the last 3 months and will be using the funds to ramp up growth.
I tried out the web version of the service and the range of choices is impressive. FindYahan can possibly find you folks ranging from food to events to domestic help to business services and more. But as an end user, the process still needs streamlining since a user currently needs to fill out a form and then create an account to get through to anything on the site. But if and once a user surpasses all of these stages, there are 4000 suppliers on the FindYahan platform. Rachit explains, "The current signup form is just to collect data points so that we can serve our users better. We're launching a new version next week which will be a much smoother experience." FindYahan is a 15 member team right now based out of Delhi and Jaipur.
Hyperlocal as a segment is becoming relevant after a gap of few years, primarily because of mobile. Smartphone penetration has increased dramatically and such services make more sense now to get the early traction. Mumbai based Doormint focuses on 'consumer service professionals' and is backed by Powai Lake Ventures, UrbanClap is another services marketplace backed by Snapdeal founders, and there are ofcourse bigger players like JustDial. FindYahan has done well to make a presence in the NCR market and it now has its work cutout to quickly scale up and make their case with a solid product.
Website: FindYahan