Khosla Ventures led the $10 million Series B funding round for the blue collar recruitment platform Vahan.ai. Y Combinator, the US venture capital firm Gaingels, and Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma also took part in the round.
The Bengaluru-based startup raised $8 million in a Series A round led by Khosla Ventures in September 2021. Vahan participated in Airtel’s Startup Accelerator Program, and in October 2019, the telecom behemoth acquired an 8.82% share in the company headed by Madhav Krishna.
According to a press release from Vahan, the additional funding will be utilized to create AI recruiting software that is compatible with eight major Indian languages. At the moment, interviews are conducted in Hindi and English by Vahan’s AI recruiter. It also intends to grow into sectors like retail and manufacturing.
Vahan states that since its founding in 2016, it has hired more than 500,000 people in more than 480 cities with major corporations like Uber, Zomato, Swiggy, Flipkart, Zepto, Blinkit, Amazon, and Rapido.
Vahan lowers expenses and speeds up the hiring process with more than 25,000 new hires every month.
Vahan recorded an operating revenue of Rs 29.7 crore and a loss of Rs 17.71 crore for the fiscal year that concluded in March 2023. Although the company has not yet submitted its FY24 annual report, it anticipates growing by at least two times in FY25.
Initially, companies like Baba Jobs and Aasaan Jobs had competed with Vahan in the blue-collar recruitment market. But after having trouble expanding, both Quikr and OLX eventually merged with them in 2017 and 2019, respectively. Following the pandemic, Tiger Global-backed Apna—which turned into a unicorn in 2021—became a significant rival.
