Pronto’s 10-minute model is reshaping domestic help in urban India

In 2024, Anjali Sardana spotted a gap in the Indian market. Customers had everything at their fingertips: food, cabs, and medical consultations. But on-demand quality household services were still out of reach. A Georgetown graduate specialising in labour market inefficiencies, Sardana began researching India’s household services. 

"You had to approach neighbours, building guards, scroll through MyGate listings, call multiple numbers, and even then, you'd often get unreliable workers who didn't show up, did subpar work, or haggled for extra money," she says.

Yet Sardana's research revealed a surprising insight: there was no shortage of workers. Household workers were unemployed or underemployed for several months each year, facing severe income instability. She spotted a clear demand-matching problem: customers couldn't find workers, and workers couldn't find customers.

"What made this inefficiency unique was that no party benefited," she explains. "Unlike typical market inefficiencies where someone profits, this was a lose-lose situation."

How Pronto works 

Sardana saw an opportunity to fix both sides of the problem. Founded in Gurugram in April 2024, Prontoconnects households with trained professionals for 14 services like cleaning, laundry, dish washing, and meal preparation, all arriving within 10 minutes.

Customers can book through the app and are matched with a Pronto professional or 'Pro' they can live-track. Services are priced by time, 30 minutes, an hour, or 90 minutes, with average order values of Rs 200-300, varying by city and locality.

Customers can add services while a job is in progress or schedule recurring appointments for daily or weekly needs. The company operates on a shift-based model, enabling quick fulfilment while offering workers guaranteed shifts and higher earnings. "Customers care about quality, safety, and reliability. Workers care about stable employment and income. Built as a win-win-win platform, Pronto bridges both," Sardana says.

Pronto competes with Snabbit and Urban Company's Instahelp vertical, with a focus on quality control and professional support.

Pronto’s vetting process

Pronto's quality control begins with face-to-face screening by a trainer. "The screening is highly selective; for every 300 people who come in, only about 50 pass," Sardana says.

Those who pass enter a five-day training programme covering hard skills across all 14 services, soft skills, grooming and hygiene, tech literacy, e-bike riding, and Pronto's processes and values. Simultaneously, the company runs background checks, verifying court records and police verification with Aadhaar and PAN documents.

After training, professionals must pass a final exam and obtain a Police Clearance Certificate before joining the active worker pool and being assigned to a hub.

Pronto's pros are paid per shift, with earnings varying by city and area. "They can earn up to Rs 40,000 a month," says Sardana. The platform has onboarded about 1,000 professionals and offers health insurance, with plans to roll out education and childcare benefits soon.

Pronto holds regular refresher sessions and has safety protocols in place. If professionals feel unsafe on-site, they can leave immediately and contact partner support, the SOS line, or their hub manager.

“In the three months I’ve been working with Pronto, the financial issues I faced earlier have disappeared. Life feels much more stable now,” Vinita, a Pronto professional, says.

Tech and 10-minute fulfilment 

Behind the scenes, Pronto runs on a three-layer tech stack: customer app, professional app, and an operations technology that connects the two. Professionals work within polygons around each hub, representing a 10-minute radius. 

"The size of these polygons varies by location; they differ based on traffic patterns and road infrastructure," Sardana explains. The operations layer automates the complex coordination between customers and professionals: matching the right person to each job, managing logistics across multiple hubs, and ensuring the timing guarantee. 

Funding and future plans 

That execution caught investor attention, and Pronto has raised $13 million to date across two rounds. The company secured $2 million in a seed round in early 2025 from Bain Capital Ventures. 

In August 2025, it closed an $11 million Series A round, co-led by General Catalyst and Glade Brook Capital, with Bain Capital Ventures participating again.

The startup currently operates across Gurugram, Noida, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Delhi, Hyderabad, and Pune. The capital has been deployed toward geographic expansion, onboarding 10,000 professionals, building residential micro-hubs, and strengthening quality assurance and real-time operational technology.

Since launching publicly in May 2025, the startup has grown 50x, Sardana says. It now handles four-figure daily bookings, though she declined to disclose exact revenue figures.

Over the next two years, Pronto plans to enter Tier I, II, and III cities across India while adding new service categories. Looking further ahead, Sardana sees a bigger shift: moving into B2B to organise India's large informal labour market. 

"The majority of this opportunity is B2B rather than B2C," she says, pointing to retail, construction, manufacturing, and other sectors that depend on informal workers today.

Pronto’s impact 

For Sardana, the most rewarding part is hearing feedback from working mothers. "My mother went back to work two weeks after I was born. I've seen her work my entire life, and managing a household simply added to her plate,” Sardana says. The constant stress of dealing with unreliable help, people quitting randomly, and struggling to find replacements, weighed on her mother throughout Sardana's childhood.

“Seeing women like my mother share feedback about how Pronto has removed this constant source of stress and genuinely improved their quality of life really motivates me." That's the force behind Pronto's mission: making household help reliable, not stressful.