Startup Circle: How is GigIndia connecting the freelancing workforce and workplaces?

Addressing India’s pressing problem of employment, Sahil Sharma and Aditya Shirole founded GigIndia in 2017 to solve a pertinent issue for Indians – finding meaningful employment opportunities. GigIndia is a marketplace that provides on-demand work completion for companies through a gig workforce of jobseekers. The startup leverages technologies like machine learning and artificial intelligence for faster turnaround and quality checks.

Read Sahil Sharma, CEO and Co-Founder of GigIndia talk about the startup.

What is Gig India about? Tell us about the team.

GigIndia is a gig workers’ marketplace for on-demand work completion. We provide meaningful employment avenues through gigs or part-time micro-jobs to fresh graduates and other job seekers. GigIndia gives large companies a fillip to remain competitive and sustainable by removing or reducing their overheads. The costs mainly pertain to recruiting, training and managing a workforce. Simultaneously, it assists students, freelancers and unemployed or out-of-work persons find remunerative part-time or full-time project-based assignments. As a result, it helps fill the gap in both supply-side and demand-side needs.

Aditya Shirole and I founded GigIndia in 2017, with a vision of providing meaningful employment opportunities to job seekers. Our Pune-based startup leverages technologies such as machine learning and artificial intelligence for faster turnaround and quality checks. GigIndia empowers large enterprises to scale up effectively, ensuring work completion through an on-demand gig workforce of 750,000-plus workers across more than 200 cities in India for all business needs.

How did you come up with the idea?

My co-founder, Aditya Shirole, and I were batch-mates in college – both pursuing B.Tech at Pune Institute of Computer Technology. As part of our course, we worked on several projects together in the second and third years, building a good rapport and understanding as teammates.

In the final year of our engineering course, we came across a problem many of our college friends were facing. Many wanted to work with companies located at the opposite end of Pune, such as Hinjewadi, which was far from the college campus. However, travelling to other parts of the city for work as well as attending final-year classes was a challenge for them. This sparked an idea to create a platform where students could work remotely for companies to gain experience and earn money.

Consequently, the platform was created to solve a problem for our friends in college. It worked. Thereafter, we scaled it into a business opportunity that has now been adopted by more than 750,000 gig workers (job seekers, homemakers and students) across 200-plus cities.

What is the trend observed on GigIndia?

While empowering large enterprises to scale effectively with on-demand work completion, GigIndia also provides meaningful employment opportunities to job seekers across India via gigs (micro-jobs). In the past six months, GigIndia has provided meaningful employment opportunities to more than 3,500 gig workers, allowing them to discover their true earning potential. After the lockdown in March 2020, we observed 215% growth in female gig workers, whose numbers increased from 12.07% to 29.34% within six months. Meanwhile, gig workers from Tier 2/3/4 cities rose from 5.22% in March to 58.11% in September 2020.

What is your business/market growth?

We started with one gig worker in 2017. However, in the first year itself, we were able to provide employment avenues to 1000+ gig workers through our platform. This was the time when the gig economy started building in India with startups like Ola, Uber and Swiggy generating employment opportunities. Then, we were mainly working with fresh college graduates who were looking for remote jobs.

With each passing year, we grew in size – for both clients and gig workers on the platform. Within a short span of 3 years, we have been able to service more than 100 clients, completing 35 million gigs in the process. We are now working with an on-demand gig workforce of 750,000-plus workers across more than 200 cities in India for all business requirements.

The pandemic has affected all sectors. Are you seeing improved traction of gig workers on your platform?

As mentioned earlier, in the six months gone by, GigIndia has offered meaningful employment to 3,500-plus gig workers, despite the challenging job market conditions.

What are the new things coming up in the industry?

The gig economy is broadly divided into three types of job roles – Blue, Grey and White Collar. Gig economy workers in the organized sector in India are currently more than 20 million (estimate). The gig economy’s size is projected to grow at a CAGR of 17%; which is likely to touch a gross volume of $455 billion by 2023, as per ASSOCHAM.

Blue Collar Jobs: These include delivery, construction, security guards, household jobs, cleaning, courier boys and drivers.

Grey Collar: Data entry, email sorting and database creation, tele-calling, tele-banker, customer support and social media monitoring.

White Collar: Teacher, consultant, hiring, research, onboarding, supply chain management and UI/UX design, among others.

Different models:

Aggregators for own business: Uber, Ola, Lyft, etc.

Managed marketplace: GigIndia, Awign

One-to-one platforms: Tapchief, Gignow

The B2C Market

This sector uses both blue-collar and grey collar workforces. There are approximately 200 million blue-collar workers in India dominating this market in the organized and unorganized segments. Startups such as Swiggy and Zomato are frequent users of this workforce, which have witnessed tremendous growth over time.

Nearer to the festive season, for instance, e-commerce giants such as Amazon and Flipkart are reportedly hiring 80,000 partners.

The B2B Market

Using a lot of grey collar and white-collar workforces, this sector holds the real promise of the gig economy’s B2B market. It has the ability to leverage people’s spare time and turn them into an on-demand workforce. It reduces a company’s cost to hire staff for a particular project, including faster onboarding.

How are you managing the unorganized gig workforce?

Unemployment and the jobs crisis comprise one of the Indian economy’s major issues. The unemployment rates for urban and rural areas in September was 8.45% and 5.86%, respectively. But it’s not just the business losses owing to COVID-19 or the lack of job opportunities that are causing the crisis. While the pandemic has rendered 18 million salaried employees and 6.8 million daily wage earners unemployed, the lack of awareness, preparedness, skills training and opportunities have worsened the situation. In addressing India’s employment issues, GigIndia is striving to find meaningful employment opportunities. At GigIndia, we first enrol job seekers for initial skilling and training, after which they are provided with job avenues through which they can earn their livelihoods remotely.

GigIndia offers on-the-go trained giggers who deliver quality performance; managed by using AI/ML-based platforms whereby our customers receive output at their planned budget. We focus on customer excellence, operating through a ‘pay-per-results’ model. Meaning gig workers only get paid for every valid unit submitted. We have built processes to streamline end-to-end gig execution for customers. With various stakeholders such as customers, gig performers and our Internal Operations team involved in the execution of gigs, our cutting-edge tech service helps them sync well together.

What are some challenges and untapped potentials of the market?

GigIndia was ahead of the curve in India and established a gig workforce as a business delivery model. Awareness to perceive gig models as a solution was still at the preliminary stage with businesses. Several fast-growing enterprises understood the value of the gig economy. They partnered with us for our on-demand gig workforce in scaling up. Several large enterprises are looking at this as a viable cost optimization business model more than ever today for their Business Continuity Plans.

Balancing demand and supply is another challenge. Fluctuation in demand sometimes leads to hyper demand while supply may fall short and vice versa. Demand can drop suddenly while supply is robust in a certain skill-set. Accordingly, it is important to be able to predict the demand and build supply as required to maintain the balance.

What are your post-COVID plans?

We have equally divided our plan between developing capabilities on demand, supply and technology. Therefore, we are looking to add another 200-plus large enterprise to our customer base. On the supply side, we aim to reach two million registered gig workers on our platform for customers. From the current base of 200-plus cities, we are looking to scale to 1500 cities and have a deeper penetration in high-demand regions. On the technology side, GigIndia will enhance its capabilities in leveraging Artificial Intelligence and machine learning to automate the processes for efficiency and high standards of service to customers.

Funding details

We have raised three rounds of funding so far – two were led by angel investors and the latest by Venture Capitals. In August 2020, GigIndia completed a pre-Series A Investment Round led by the Japan-headquartered Incubate Fund India with participation from Beyond Next Ventures. Our angel investors are Mr S Ramadorai, former CEO of TCS; Mr Kiran Deshpande, former CEO of Tech Mahindra; Mr Ravi Nigam, former MD & Co-founder of Tasty Bite Eatables; and Mr Shashank Deshpande, Co-founder of Clarice Technologies. All of them also participated in the rounds of financing.