Pronto, a Bengaluru-based instant household services platform, has closed a $45 million in Series B funding round. The round includes a $20 million investment from Lachy Groom, co-founder of AI robotics company Physical Intelligence and an early backer of quick commerce startup Zepto. The fresh investment values Pronto at $200 million, double what it was valued at just a month ago when the first tranche of this Series B was closed. The startup has now raised approximately $60 million in total, with investors including General Catalyst, Bain Capital Ventures, Glade Brook, Epiq Capital, and Lachy Groom.
"Organizing informal labor is going to be one of the defining shifts of the next decade in services. It is also one of the harder problems in the consumer economy. The work of the last year has been about that. The longer-term vision of Pronto is to be the world's largest labor organization platform," said Anjali Sardana, Founder and CEO of Pronto.
Beyond structured earnings, the startup has built several support systems for its professionals. The startup said that each professional receives a uniform, health insurance, and access to Yulu bikes and helmets for commuting. Notably, each service request includes an SOS button that connects directly to a real person. In the event of an incident, it provides legal support to file police cases, and its on-ground team responds immediately to accompany professionals to hospitals or police stations, contact their families, and manage the situation.
Lachy Groom, who led the $20 million portion of this round, said, "Pronto's ambition is to build the world's largest labor organization platform, starting with the country that has the largest and least structured labor market in the world. The work underneath that is genuinely hard and most attempts in adjacent categories have struggled with the operational discipline. Anjali and the team are doing it at a level I haven't seen elsewhere in this space."
About Pronto
Pronto has been founded by Anjali Sardana. This startup helps in finding domestic help in urban India today still relies heavily on word of mouth. Most households depend on neighbours and building WhatsApp groups, with no real guarantee that the person hired will show up consistently. For the workers, most of whom are women, the situation is equally uncertain. They work without contracts, face irregular income, and have little recourse when something goes wrong on a job.