On-demand home service marketplace Zimmber secures $2 M from IDG Ventures, Omdiyar Networks, and others

It’s raining money for hyperlocal startups in India. On-demand home services marketplace Zimmber has raised sub $2 million pre-Series A round led by IDG Ventures and Omdiyar Networks, including Ram Shriram founding board member of Google and TV Mohandas Pai.

Importantly, this is the third round of funding secured by Zimmber within a month. Earlier the company had raised $ 400K (around Rs 2.5 crore) from a consortium of angels, including InMobi's Co-founders Naveen Tiwari.

Prior to this, Zimmber snapped up seed round from Praveen Sinha, Vivek Khemka, Satyam Bansal, and Alex Kuruvilla. The company will use pre-Series A round to add more categories, spruce-up technology and expansion.

The brainchild of Anubhab Goel, Amit Kumar and Gaurav Shrivastava -- Zimmber -- provides home services like home painting, AC services, plumbing, carpentry, and home cleaning, among others. The company recently ventured into driver category.

Commenting on the round, Anubhab Goel, CEO and Co-founder of Zimmber said,

Organizing the extremely fragmented local services marketplace, and trusting servicemen with local services is a very big problem that the consumer faces currently. Hence, by training these people, whom we call Champs in our vocabulary, Zimmber is trying to solve the existing problem.

Unlike other startups, Zimmber trains and accredits all handymen before enrolling them on the platform.

Zimmber is currently operational in Gurgaon, Mumbai, and Pune and has 400 plus service providers enrolled on the platform. With a 70-people team, Zimmber plans to have a presence in the entire NCR, Kolkata, and Chennai, including tier II and III cities.

Ranjith Menon, Executive Director at IDG Ventures India, said,

Local services is an unorganized market in India. This platform will deliver a plethora of services that one needs everyday but not sure where to find. To solve this using technology is the challenge. The mobile-first approach combined with the operational experience of the founding team is what got us excited about the opportunity.

In the long-term, the company plans to enter 37 new cities and also expand to 20 categories by early 2016. It claims to be growing 2X every week.

Recommended read: With 3K transaction in a month, Zimmber raises $400K from Naveen Tewari, acqui-hires Mumbai-based Dhulai

The company competes with Taskbob, Doormint, Urbanclap, Urbanpro, and Localoye among several others. The market size of hyperlocal services estimated to be worth $4 billion, which is set to explode exponentially in coming years.

YourStory’s take

Of late, this sector has received great VC interest in India and close to 10 startups in this space had secured funding from angels and VCs. The space also attracted unprecedented faith of entrepreneurs and over 60 startups being founded alone in 2014, however, only a few of them have seen real traction and are expected to move to the next stages in the crowded market.

Demand of on-demand services has seen an upsurge in metro and top cities this year. Consequently, we see a lot of startups entering the hyperlocal service market. Emphasis on training service providers and their upliftment are striking differentiators of Zimmber from their competition.

Importantly, Zimmber attracted a set of popular angel investors like Naveen Tewari (InMobi), Praveen Sinha (Jabong), Ram Shriram (Board member at Google) among a few notable angels.

Hyperlocal space is gearing up for consolidation and we may see some actions in this direction soon.

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