Home services marketplace Zimmber raises $2 million in pre-Series-A round

IDG Ventures, Ram Sriram, TV Mohandas Pai among investors

Zimmber, a Mumbai-based on-demand, hyperlocal home services start-up, said it had raised $2 million (Rs 12.9 crore) in a pre-Series-A round of funding led by IDG Ventures, with participation from Omdiyar Networks, Ram Sriram, founding board member of Google through Sherpalo Ventures, and T V Mohandas Pai , chairman of Manipal Global Education and former member of board of Infosys through  Aarin Capital.

"The fresh round of funds will be utilised to expand our presence to more cities like Delhi, the National Capital Region and Thane during this year, develop technology, and ramp up our headcount on the technology side from the present 70 to 120 professional within the next three months," said Anubhab Goel, co-founder and chief executive officer of Zimmber.

Founded in October 2014 by Goel, Amit Kumar and Gaurav Srivastava, Zimmber currently has operations in Mumbai, Pune and Gurgaon, offering nine services including home painting, AC and electrical, sofa and carpet cleaning, plumbing, carpentry and masonry.

"We recently added driver-on-demand and laundry services. We plan to enter 37 new cities and expand to 20 categories by early 2016," Goel said.

Zimmber had in June 2015 raised $400,000 (around Rs 2.5 crore) in a bridge round from Bengaluru-based InMobi's co-founders Naveen Tiwari, MohitSaxena and Amit Gupta, along with chief product officer Piyush Shah, and others.

Prior to this round, Praveen Sinha, co-founder and managing director of Jabong, and Satyam Bansal, director (mobile app distribution and strategic alliances) at Flipkart, had invested an undisclosed amount in Zimmber.

The on-demand services sector has received great VC interest in India with more than 69 startups in this space being founded alone in 2014. The opportunity in India is estimated to be as high as $4 billion, which is set to explode as the ventures tap into the Tier-II and Tier-III cities in the country.