Betterplace Raises $10 Mn in Series B Funding from Singapore based Jungle Ventures

Betterplace, India's largest blue collar workforce management platform, raises $10m in Series B funding from Singapore based Jungle Ventures

• Round led by Jungle Ventures with participation from existing investors - Unitus
• Ventures, 3One4 Capital and Venture Highway
• Funds will be utilized to scale the platform and expand business operations in India and overseas markets
• Today Betterplace is digitally serving more than 2 Mn workers across 1,000+ enterprises annually

(L-R) Betterplace co-founders Saurabh Tandon and Pravin Agarwala 


Betterplace, India's largest tech platform delivering digital solutions for blue collar workforce management throughout the entire value chain, has raised $10 million in a Series B round led by Jungle Ventures and a total of $16 million since its inception. Existing investors, Unitus Ventures, 3One4 Capital, and Venture Highway also participated in the round.

Launched in 2015, Betterplace addresses the $30 Bn India opportunity of blue-collar workforce management, impacting over 450 Mn people. Through its data-driven, tech platform, Betterplace uniquely fulfills the requirements of both enterprises and the workforce in this fragmented and underserved ecosystem.

For enterprises, it offers a seamless end-to-end workforce management system with its inbuilt proprietary digital tools and services which provide employers a ready resource pool to hire from, completely automated onboarding with inbuilt compliance, touchless attendance management, real-time visibility in resource utilization, one-click payroll management and much more. For the workforce, Betterplace offers a rich employee engagement platform that gives access to a variety of upskilling, financial support and medical benefits program. Today Betterplace is proud to partner with enterprises such as Amazon, Zomato, Flipkart, Accenture, L&T, Mahindra Logistics, and over 2million blue-collar workforce annually.

With this fundraise, the company will continue to deliver innovative products, build its presence in new business verticals, expand its footprint in the SME sector, and grow internationally. Betterplace will also be scaling its Hire-Engage-Manage digital solutions which connect over 150 Mn blue collar workforce with the growing hiring needs of enterprises.

Joining the board of the company, Anurag Srivastava, Founding Partner at Jungle Ventures, says, "The global blue collar workforce space is expected to be $455 Bn opportunity globally by 2023 and we are very excited to partner with Betterplace on this journey with them. We look forward to working with the team and help them to expand in India and South East Asia".

Pravin Agarwala, Co-founder CEO, Betterplace, says, "The blue collar ecosystem is undergoing massive digital transformation and the ongoing pandemic has accelerated this adoption. We are onboarding more than 150k people digitally every month and aim to serve 2000 enterprises and a 3 million workforce by the end of this financial year."

About Betterplace

Betterplace, India's largest tech platform for blue-collar workforce management founded in 2015 works with more than 1000 companies in India to meet the aspirations and needs of the blue collar workforce, with the objective to organize the hiring, managing and engaging model coupled with the vision to improve their livelihood. Betterplace customers are present across blue collar heavy industries such as Private Security, Logistics, Facility Management, IT/ITES, On-Demand Services, Retail, Construction and more.

Betterplace's SaaS platform enables employers to manage the entire life cycle of their blue collar workforce by providing them services such as Hiring, Assessment of job seekers, Digital onboarding, KYC, Training, Attendance management, Payroll,Compliance and more, while helping blue collar employees get trained and up-skilled, with access to financial and healthcare services. Since its inception, Betterplace has helped empower over 8 million people and aims to bring 150 million workers into the formal economy by 2025.

Zomato Launches Experience Center for its Delivery Fleet in partnership with BetterPlace

Zomato announces the launch of its first experience center in Bangalore for providing a uniquely differentiated experience to its delivery partners right from their sourcing and on boarding to various benefits. The center expects to on-board ~200 delivery executives per day.  

Zomato engages over 1.5 lakhs delivery partners and this particular development throws light on the necessity of streamlining the fleet in terms of on-boarding and training.

Team Zomato and Team BetterPlace

The Bangalore-based center will be managed by BetterPlace, India's largest technology platform for life cycle management of blue collar workforce. They will be directly responsible for managing several delivery fleet-related activities like getting the candidates to the Centre, educating them about the job and earnings, verification of documents, interviewing, on-boarding them, and getting them ready for the job with Zomato app installation, training to use the app, bag, uniform, grooming, etiquette and soft skills training, and much more.

The Centre will also partner with players that provide loans and offers for getting a smartphone or a bike, exclusively designed only for Delivery Partners.

“We firmly believe that our delivery fleet is the backbone of Zomato’s online ordering business and our partnership with BetterPlace is a factor of our core beliefs. With the experience centre in picture, we expect to not only enable our delivery partners to benefit heavily from it but, also hope to see an improvement in end user experience,” said Mohit Kumar, COO, Food Delivery at Zomato.

BetterPlace launches 'SkillConnect', A Digital Bridge for Blue Collar Skilling to Meet Demands of the Industry

BetterPlace, India’s leading technology platform for Blue Collar work-force has launched SkillConnect, a digital platform to bridge the gap between demand and supply for blue collars skilled workforce, by addressing the problem in a holistic manner from industry demand aggregation to sourcing, training, certification and placement, based on industry specific future demand.

Anantkumar Hegde, Minister of State for Skill Development & Entrepreneurship unveiled the platform to the top industry leaders. On Day 0, SkillConnect indicated availability of more than 20 lakh jobs for the blue-collar workforce.

Pravin Agarwala, Co-founder & CEO, BetterPlace said, “We are seeing that employers are facing a severe shortage of skilled manpower, especially in the high growth sectors like logistics, facility management, security services, On-demand services, schools, etc. Meanwhile, the training institutes are looking for opportunities to place their trained & certified candidates. SkillConnect would be digital bridge to help connect the 2 sides. We are already seeing a demand for 20 Lakh candidates in the next 12 months based on current hiring trends of our customers. The total demand would be more than 2 Crore in the next 12 months.” The Company aims to on board one-lakh employers over the next 18 months, he adds.

Adding to this, T V Mohandas Pai, Chairman of Manipal Global Education said, “Indian consumers today demand a world class service, and for industry to deliver that kind of service, there is an un-fulfilled need for a highly skilled workforce to meet the customer’s expectations, be more productive and to be real-life ambassadors of the brand”.

SkillConnect will work as a digital bridge to address the gap between demand and supply of blue-collar jobs pan India. Currently, the training institutes are skilling the candidates based on a fixed curriculum and then they start looking for a job matching with their skills. This doesn’t result in high employment as the industry demand is constantly evolving. Thus, the idea of SkillConnect is to make the platform demand driven so that the training institutes already know the job roles available in the market in a quantifiable manner and train the manpower accordingly.

A digital platform to move 20 million skilled rural youth, into India’s formal economy, in a friction-less manner. We have been looking for technology focused solution to address the challenges of getting reliable data that reflects the demand specifics, so that we can enhance placements by aligning our efforts with the demands of the industry. SkillConnect will help us by aggregating demand based on current hiring trends and future projections provide by employers”, said Manish Kumar, CEO, NSDC.

Highlighting the challenges of both demand and supply side, Saurabh Tandon, Co-founder & COO, BetterPlace said, “On the demand-side for blue collars workforce, besides the shortage of skilled candidates, there are sourcing challenges because the supply consists of ~75% migratory population, mainly coming through an un-organized ecosystem. Technology adoption can give dividends in terms of transparency and cost saving”.

Top employers in verticals like facility management, delivery and logistics, QSR, cab hailing, attended the launch event and have thrown their weight behind the initiative.

“As an industry, the facility management space is currently growing at 15% annually, and the attrition rates are very high especially at the front-line level. Our industry will need more than 10 Lakh people in the next 1 year. Getting trained and ready-to-be-deployed-workforce via an aggregation platform like SkillConnect would be a significant catalyst,” said Sandeep Sethi, MD IFM, JLL, a market leader in the Integrated Facility Management space in the country managing more than 450 million SFT facility space.

BetterPlace, started in 2015, by Pravin Agarwala and Saurabh Tandon, has been working tirelessly to accelerate blue-collar workforce movement from unorganized to a formal economy with an aim to provide them with a better quality of life and a clear career progression path. The launch of SkillConnect is the first of many steps in realizing that vision.

About BetterPlace Safety Solutions, it provides a digital platform for managing the lifecycle of blue-collar employees, like On-boarding, Background Verification, Training. Assessment & Certification, Attendance Management, Financial Service like loans & insurance to employees.

They are trusted by 1,000+ customers across Blue Collar heavy Industries like Private Security, Logistics, Facility Management, IT/ITES, On-Demand Services, Retail, Schools and more.

They have our Corporate Office in Bengaluru & our Regional office in Gurugram.

[Top Image - Saurabh Tondon, Co-founder of BetterPlace © IndianWeb2.com]

Venture Highway Invests in Bangalore-Based Digital Trust Solution Provider, BetterPlace

Venture Highway (through VH Capital), supporting next generation of Indian entrepreneurs that are innovating for the masses, today announced an investment in BetterPlace Safety Solutions, a Bangalore-based digital trust solution provider aiming to create “A Better Place For A Billion+ Indian Citizens”. Venture Highway is founded by Samir Sood, Ex-Head of Corporate Development - South Asia, Australia at Google, and is advised by Neeraj Arora, Business Head at WhatsApp.

Founded in 2015, BetterPlace has created India’s first web service that addresses the ‘trust deficit’ in any form of alliance or interaction between individuals and entities. With emphasis on building digital data to address the trust deficit, BetterPlace hopes to play its part in movement of millions of Indians from in-formal and semi- formal segments of the economy to one where the digital trust profile enables individuals to access services such as credit, health and insurance.

Commenting on the progress made by BetterPlace, Pravin Agarwala, CEO and founder said, “India is at a very interesting cross road where we are seeing massive migration across states, growth of the services sector to a point where it today employs more people than any other segment along with increased smartphone penetration thereby enabling the possibility of large scale digitization. These trends enable us to continue to build trust profiles on top of the Aadhaar platform”.

"We have been on the lookout for large opportunities that are scalable and impact the masses but do so in a financially prudent manner. After evaluating BetterPlace, we are deeply impressed with the core team, their strong technology platform and their vision to leverage the trust profiles. We believe this will bridge a much- needed gap in the safety quotient of the country and are excited to be part of the BetterPlace story.” said Venture Highway founder, Samir Sood.

Since its launch BetterPlace has created 2 lakh+ paid safety profiles of individuals with its aim to hit a million profiles in 2017. It today is helping its diverse client base and markets leaders across private security, facility management, last mile fulfillment, manpower suppliers and on demand aggregators. Reflecting on the progress made, Will Poole managing partner at Unitus commented “BetterPlace continues to make tremendous progress on its suite of products while at the same time cementing segment wise market leadership across areas that collectively employ 50 Million people in an organized manner”.

In Q1 2016, the firm announced a seed investment from Unitus, India’s most active seed fund. This was preceded in late 2015 by an angle investment by ex-Google India Products head and the man behind Google’s Map Maker, Lalitesh Katragadda who also continues to be a Board member and technology mentor.