‘Apna' time aagaya: Inside India's youngest unicorn

Nirmit Parikh was in Dallas when news of his startup, jobs and professional networking platform Apna, entering the unicorn club reached him. 

It may have rung in celebrations for the 20-month-old startup, but Nirmit was focused on other things — primarily expanding to the Southeast Asian and the US markets. 

“I spent the day with some of the workforce here to understand what they need in terms of upskilling and growth. The needs of this market are very different, and we believe growth in these markets is the next step for us,” says Nirmit in a conversation with YourStory. 

The pre-revenue startup has already seen 125X growth. The platform has over five million job openings on the portal, 150,000 SMB and enterprise recruiters on the platform, 16 million users, having conducted around 18 million interviews. 

It aims to touch over 2.3 billion people in the working class category across the world within the next two years. 

With the latest $100 million Series C funding led by Tiger Global, Apna is now valued at $1.1 billion, and has replaced B2B ecommerce platform Udaan as the youngest startup to reach the unicorn status. 

However, Apna isn’t the first in this market. Startups like Betterplace, JustRojgar and Spayee have their eyes on the same space and opportunity. 

So what led investors to bet on this pre-revenue startup? Read here.

Click here to find some useful tools to help you find the nearest vaccine centres in real-time.

The Interview

Watch Vivek Bhargava, Co-founder of ProfitWheel, and Chairman of the IAMAI Startup Committee, as he talks to YourStory about how IAMAI Circle aims to support startups in their growth journey with an unbiased and transparent mentoring framework.

Editor’s Pick: ClearTax: Becoming a full-stack financial company

Before the Paytm and Zerodha of India steered conversations around financial technology and rewrote the future of finance in India, there was ClearTax. An iconic startup in its own right, veterans in the industry today say, ClearTax when it was founded, served as a lighthouse in the uncharted waters of fintech.

It all started with IIT Guwahati alumnus Archit Gupta, his experience and learnings in Silicon Valley bolstered his conviction to set up his own startup. Read more.

Startup Spotlight

This SaaS startup automates service desk for 500M employees globally

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, SaaS startup Rezolve AI’s website was seeing organic website traffic of 1,500 a month. However, with the onset of the coronavirus pandemic and people working remotely, the traffic started rising. And by June 2020, it touched 7,000 prospects and then 15,000 in August. 

Started in 2017 by IIM Bangalore alumni Saurabh Kumar, Manish Sharma, and Udaya Reddy, US and India-based Rezolve AI is an AI-led, automated employee service desk. The startup aims to disrupt the IT support market by improving employee servicing experience and satisfaction through its automated query resolution software. Read more. 

News & Updates

• Medtech startup Fibroheal Woundcare said it raised undisclosed funding from the venture fund arm of the Karnataka government, Karnataka Information Technology Venture Capital Fund (KITVEN).

• The Reserve Bank of India's (RBI) decision to allow NBFCs and payment service providers to apply for obtaining an Aadhaar e-KYC Authentication Licence will promote digitisation and check frauds, opined fintech players.

• Ecommerce major Amazon said sellers will now be able to register on the Amazon.in marketplace and manage their online business in three more Indic languages — Malayalam, Telugu, and Bengali.

Before you go, stay inspired with… 

“There cannot be a better time than now to talk about the brands of India. They have transformed the way they serve citizens who are in containment zones.”

—  Anil Agrawal, Additional Secretary, Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade, Government of India

Now get the Daily Capsule in your inbox. Subscribe to our newsletter today!