[100 Emerging Women Leaders] Shreya Prakash’s FlexiBees matches women professionals with flexible jobs

Shreya Prakash thrived at Unilever for eight years, first in a sales role before moving on to a brand role. An engineer, Prakash changed her career to business management, topping it with an MBA from IIM Bangalore. 

Nonetheless, entrepreneurship attracted her intermittently through business school and in the years after. She recalls having a different kind of learning parallelly.

“From building platforms to bringing local artisans to global audiences or creating beloved consumer brands, there was no paucity of ideas. But nothing felt right—like it would be worth the trouble and risk,” she tells HerStory.

However, one idea captured her attention—the challenges women professionals faced to grow in their careers after getting married or attaining motherhood.

Prakash learned through the experiences of her close friends and colleagues, especially how her friend from B-school and a chartered accountant, Deepa Swami, found it exceedingly difficult to return to work as flexible work options were few and far between.

It’s the story of millions of talented women professionals in India who drop out of the workforce owing to marriage and maternity. 

Helping women regain their identities

“The reasons are many, ranging from rigid gender roles to lack of flexibility at work, but the upshot of it is that India’s female labour force participation rate stands at a low of 33% for women, especially when seen in the context of the equivalent rate for men at 80%,” she explains.

In societies like India, when women prioritise family over their professional work at the complete exclusion of the latter—often due to societal and systemic factors—they often feel something of an incompleteness.

“As increasingly more girls in India get educated and enter the workforce, their professional selves and the skills they bring and spend time honing are crucial parts of their identity. When no avenues are available to utilise these skills, it starts to chafe,” Prakash adds.

Prakash, Swami, and Rashmi Rammohan, batchmates in IIM-B, had a clear goal—to help women regain their identity and reach their full potential by keeping flexibility at the heart of their solution. This paved the way for FlexiBees in 2017. Prakash is the company's Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Swami is the Chief Talent Officer (CTO), and Rammohan is the Chief Operating Officer (COO). 

Flexible work options

FlexiBees matches talented and qualified women professionals to flexible requirements from companies, helping them balance their professional and personal priorities. Companies, too, can hire experienced talent in an affordable and on-demand way on the FlexiBees platform. 

The startup incorporated in Singapore and Mumbai, focuses on part-time, project-based, and remote work that unlocks productivity for both the demand and supply sides.

Soon after the launch, however, the founders were determined that creating this access was not enough, and matching had to be done that resulted in success.

“We developed our proprietary vetting technology that matches multiple parameters across skills and flexibility factors, i.e., time availability, support systems, commitment, and work ethics, resulting in better matches for all concerned,” Prakash explains. 

She adds that the technology ensures women get jobs aligned to their skills and life-stage needs, besides companies hiring candidates who can do justice to the roles. 

FlexiBees provides talent across industries and functions, including sales, digital marketing, content, virtual assistance, and HR roles, in mostly startups and SMBs in India, Singapore, the UK, the US, and UAE, among other countries. 

“We speak primarily to founders and heads of verticals in these companies, who want to hire experienced and vetted talent quickly and affordably. Our models have affordability built-in due to the part-time and project-based nature of it. And since we operate with an on-demand workforce, it is easy to hire quickly and scale down too, if needed,” she says.

The talent pool on FlexiBees has, on average, 5-7 years of experience and is productive from day one, enabling companies to grow quickly. The startup sees 70% of its business coming from repeat clients.

Improving confidence and decision-making skills

So far, FlexiBees has provided talent to 800+ companies across the globe, giving jobs to 2,000+ women from the Indian metro and Tier II-III cities. In the process, it has impacted 20,000+ women by grooming them for interviews, thus preparing them to return to the workforce.

“In fact, as per a third-party survey we commissioned a couple of years ago, women placed by us in remote and part-time jobs saw an increase in their household income by 22% on average,” Prakash says. 

She adds, “Having a sense of contribution, purpose, and their income improves their confidence, decision-making power, and respect within their families and communities.” 

FlexiBees recently raised an undisclosed pre-Series A funding round from Inflection Point Ventures, supplemented by angel investors and global startup entrepreneurs.

“With our recent round of funding, we want to continue the same pace of growth to become a $200 million+ topline business in five years and impact five million women professionals during the same time through our jobs and upskilling offerings,” she says.

According to Prakash, FlexiBees’ biggest success is its scalable vetting technology, augmented by artificial intelligence (AI), which can match over a thousand skills and key life stages of candidates.

It’s difficult to be a woman entrepreneur anywhere, avers Prakash. 

She points to research that implies investors view women entrepreneurs differently and ask more “prevention” questions, i.e., risks or what could go wrong, instead of “promotion” questions centring on growth and opportunity. 

Her advice is simple but effective.

“Build your network. That’s where you will get your first 10, 20, or 50 customers. As startups, we don’t have the marketing budgets or any latent brand value. We have to create our brands through the dint of our voices. So, never hesitate to speak about what you do and your achievements because if you don’t, who will?”