Mumbai-based Doormint raises $3M funding led by Helion Ventures and Kalaari Capital

Mumbai-based Doormint, a hyper-local consumer service provider, has raised around $3 million in its Series A funding round led by Helion Ventures and Kalaari Capital. The venture aims to utilize this investment in the expansion of its current service network in Mumbai, as well as in establishing its presence in other metro cities. It is also looking to expand the team, and get professionals with good track records onboard across marketing, operations and technology.

“We aim to provide affordable, technology-driven home solutions to our consumers. This latest investment comes as a major shot to the arm, enabling us to expand and consolidate our service network in Mumbai, while also proliferating in Delhi, Gurgaon and Bengaluru. We have complete faith that, with our superior service penetration and customer-oriented mobile interface, we will establish ourselves as a market leader in the next six months,” says AbhinavAgarwal, CEO,Doormint.

Launched in January 2015, Doormint offers on-demand consumerservices such as electricians, plumbers, carpenters, electronics appliance repair, and pest control.In the past eight months, the venture claims to have grown exponentially. Currently, it has a team size of 50 people, and aims to up this figure to 150-200 as it expands to and in other cities. The venture also claims to have around 200 transactions per day, and aims to take the figure to over 1000 in the coming months.

In April this year, the ventureraisedan undisclosed amount of angel funding from Powai Lake Ventures.

On-going investment and Competition in space

The entire hyperlocal on-demand sector has witnessed a large boom. According to YS Research and Venture Intelligence, this year, till mid-June, the sectorwitnessed 27 deals,with funding amounting to over $135 million. Sequoia Capital, SAIF Partners, Nexus Ventures, Accel Partners India, Tiger Global and Nirvana Ventures — to name a few — are some of the investors in the segment.

Doormint has many direct and indirect competitors in the segment. Local listing portals such as JustDial, Sulekha, and YellowPages, and service providers such asHammer, Mop and others, pose indirect competition. And aggregators like UrbanClap, TimeSaverz, Taskbob, Mr. Right and Zepper are in the same segment.

Doormint is not the only one to have gainedfrom investors’ new fixation with the hyper-local on-demand consumer service provider segment.Others in this segment too have secured large amounts of funding.

In April 2015, Taskbob raised $1.2 million worth of seed funding from Orios Venture Partners and the Mayfield Fund. In June this year, UrbanClap raised $10 million in Series A funding. In July, Zimmber secured $2 million from IDG Ventures, Omdiyar Networks, and others.

Talking about the sector, and investment in Doormint, RiteshBanglani, Partner at Helion Ventures, said “On-demand home services is a fast-growing market in urban areas.Tech-savvy consumers seek time-saving resources in order to meet their maintenance and repair household needs. Doormint’s key differentiator -being a branded service that takes full responsibility for service delivery and customer satisfaction, along with convenient and superior product offerings (such as one-touch home service to eliminate calling, upfront pricing and post service warranty)–has it pegged to become the market leader."