India’s Pronto formalizes house help as its valuation jumps 8× in under a year

Bangalore-based Pronto is helping bring India’s largely informal domestic help market online. As daily bookings increase and the city’s footprint expands, investors are opening their wallets.

The startup announced Tuesday that it had raised a $25 million Series B round led by Epiq Capital, valuing the nine-month-old company at $100 million. That’s more than double its $45 million valuation in August 2025 and more than eight times the $12.5 million level when it came out of stealth in May. Existing investors Glade Brook Capital, General Catalyst and Bain Capital Ventures also participated, bringing the total funding to approximately $40 million.

Pronto offers fast, structured services for everyday tasks – from cleaning utensils to cleaning – promising trained and verified professionals on demand.

The startup says it can dispatch workers in about 10 minutes to many of its micromarkets (serviced locations in the cities it operates), positioning the service closer to quick commerce than traditional home services. Each worker – who the company calls a “Pro” – undergoes in-person training and background checks before taking bookings, and is assigned structured shifts intended to provide a more predictable income than the informal arrangements common in the industry.

Pronto now handles 18,000 bookings per day, up sharply from 1,000 daily bookings last year, founder Anjali Sardana (pictured above, center) said in an interview. The median time between a customer’s first and second booking is just two days, she added, with the top 10% of the platform’s users placing nine or more orders per month. Sardana said the startup is targeting 70,000 daily bookings by June.

The startup has also rapidly expanded its geographic footprint, from one city to 10 — including Delhi NCR, Bengaluru and Mumbai — and from five to over 150 micromarkets in the last seven months, Sardana said. The bulk of activity, however, remains concentrated in a handful of markets, with the National Capital Region, which includes cities surrounding New Delhi, accounting for about half of total bookings.

Sardana said Pronto has only just begun to tap India’s mostly offline domestic services market, where most hiring still happens through informal networks. “I still believe that 99.99% of this market is completely offline,” she told TechCrunch. “In total, fewer than 100,000 people use a service like this every day, while tens of millions of households rely on offline arrangements. »

Market studies confirm this. The overall home services industry, according to a report by Redseer Strategy Consultants, was valued at ₹5.1 trillion to ₹5.21 trillion (approximately $56 billion to $57 billion) in fiscal 2025. Yet online penetration stood at less than 1% of net transaction value, underscoring how deeply entrenched word-of-mouth channels remain. But the online segment – ​​currently small – is expected to grow at a compound annual rate of 18-22% through 2030, as rising incomes, urbanization and demand for reliability and convenience push more households to try digital platforms.

Pronto currently works with 4,500 active professionals on its platform, about 99% of whom are women, Sardana said. Workers who put in around 20 days of work a month earn on average between ₹23,000 and ₹25,000 (about $251 to $273), she added. Monthly worker retention is over 70%. Despite this, demand continues to outpace onboarding of new workers, with bookings increasing about 20% week over week, the founder said.

Pronto’s unit economics continue to evolve as it expands into new markets. Sardana said the company is seeing “very positive green shoots” in its older micro markets in Gurugram, where contribution margins have turned positive, even as the newer markets remain in investment mode.

Sardana told TechCrunch that Pronto has spent about $8 million to date and now has about two years of runway after the last fundraising round.

Pronto plans to deploy the new capital primarily to recruit more professionals, deepen its presence in existing markets and expand into new cities, Sardana said. It is also testing new offerings such as cooking, car washing and dog walking, and exploring other categories including salon services. For now, however, core tasks, including sweeping, mopping, and utensil cleaning, remain the platform’s most used services.

The startup operates with a core team of about 60 employees, including about 15 to 16 people in engineering, product and design, while marketing remains small with a small brand and performance team, Sardana said.

Pronto operates in an increasingly dynamic segment of the Indian home services market, alongside competitors such as Snabbit and publicly traded Urban Company. Snabbit raised $30 million in late October at a valuation of $180 million — more than doubling in five months — and reported about 830,000 orders in February, up from about 500,000 in December. Urban Company, meanwhile, said its platform surpassed 50,000 daily bookings in February.

Sensor Tower data reviewed by TechCrunch suggests that Pronto’s daily active users grew by about 37% to around 101,000 between the end of January and the end of February, compared to Snabbit’s growth of around 30% to around 93,000 daily users during the same period.

Sardana said Pronto remains focused on quality of service as competition intensifies. “Ultimately, customers will gravitate to the platform that provides the highest quality service,” she said.