Bengaluru-headquartered blue and grey-collar job portal WorkIndia has raised $12 million in its pre-series B funding from SBI Holdings, Tokyo, Yamauchi No.10 Family Office, the founding family of Nintendo, Persol, and Insitor.

Kunal Patil, Co-founder  and CEO, WorkIndia said the company plans to utilise the fresh funds to further strengthen its product and data science capabilities including entry into the yet untapped Southeast Asian blue-collar market.

"Under the situation where job seekers have to call employers over the phones to get a job in India, the filtration of the calls which makes every call meaningful is extremely crucial for both the job seekers and employers to save time and cost. WorkIndia’s unique relevance matching system between job seekers’ skills and employers' needs, based on full, partial, and waterfall matching has done a phenomenal job in this respect. This value proposition and the data-driven platform backed by the AI-based technology with the massive behavioural data gathered by WorkIndia were the key reasons for our investment,” said Tomoyuki Nii, Director of SBI Investment, the investment arm of SBI Holdings Inc. listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in Japan.

Hirowaka Murakami, Chief Investment Officer of Yamauchi No.10 Family Office, said achieving rapid revenue growth while demonstrating high unit economics and a negative working capital model is no easy feat, and WorkIndia has consistently demonstrated this for over a year.

“We look forward to supporting them as they expand rapidly in this wild west of a blue-collar segment." 

The literacy level of blue-collar workers is usually low making them highly prone to fraudulent jobs - one of the biggest challenges faced by workers in the Indian blue-collar segment. 

WorkIndia aims to mitigate this fraud in hiring as much as possible. Its fraud detection technology processes 9.8 million data parameters and leverages a fully automated system rooted deep in dynamic algorithm-based hiring and geo-tagging which matches data demographically, evaluates eligibility, and observes behaviour to suggest relevant jobs effectively. 

Attrition is a major challenge faced by employers looking to hire blue-collar workers. A blue-collar worker spends more than 20% of his monthly income traveling to work. A critical driver to reducing attrition is providing close proximity jobs to blue-collar workers. Utilising Centroid Relative Distancing, WorkIndia has built a technology system that significantly reduces traveling hassles for the workers thus reducing attrition for the employers. 

“WorkIndia is not only boosting the economy and maintaining the demand and supply balance for job opportunities, but also creating a meaningful impact on the lives of blue and grey-collar individuals. We are excited to support WorkIndia in further consolidating its leadership position,” added Nicholas Lazos, Co-Founder of Insitor.