Raghav Chandra of Urban Company decodes successful tech strategies for scale-ups

The Soonicorn Spotlight is a brand-new video series by YourStory in collaboration with PayU, one of India's leading payments solution providers. It was created to provide startup leaders with first-hand growth insights from some of the finest minds at the helm of the fastest-growing startups in the ecosystem.  

  When it comes to hyper-scale growth, nowhere is the phenomenon more evident than in the startup ecosystem. Successful startups often see funding rounds in rapid succession, and are tasked with managing rapid-scale growth, while also executing and expanding tech at an unprecedented scale.

Raghav, who leads the tech vertical at Urban Company, Asia's largest home services company that operates in over 50 cities across 5 countries, draws from his experience at Urban Company to let us in on what goes into creating a successful tech playbook for scale-ups, 

An alumnus of the University of California, Berkeley, Raghav shared his first-hand perspectives in an insight-packed conversation with Yourstory.

I believe every company needs to ask the question: ‘What do we want from tech?’ Do we want tech to be an enabler or a delivery mechanism? Or do we want it to be a driver?,” says Raghav.

“We've been able to build common stacks across business lines which then empower them. This gives us speed at scale,” he said as he spoke about Urban Company’s tech stack and the tech strategy that went into creating the best home service.

“This means we already have stacks built for any new business line, which gets added. Our tech team is therefore able to focus on adding newer capabilities and newer business models. This strategy has done wonders for how we operate with tech and how it influences business in terms of its scaling,” he said.

“When we went international, it hardly took us a month to launch in the first new country because a lot of the fundamentals had already been built in,” he added.

Catch all these insights and more on the fourth episode of The Soonicorn Spotlight, brought to you by PayU. For more relevant content on powering your growth or scaling journeys, do visit the specially curated content Scale-up India page, here.