SAIF Partners invest in mobile crowd-sourcing platform 'Playment'

Leading venture capital firm SAIF Partners has announced a pre-series A funding deal of Rs. 4.7 crore into the Bangalore-based venture Playment that enables large companies to crowd-source completion of process oriented tasks that are typically done by in-house or outsourced teams (BPOs).

Playment will use the funds raised to lay the foundation of a world class engineering and product team, along with scaling up deployments in all clients.

Playment is a two sided marketplace that helps large companies bring cost-effectiveness and speed to their operations, and on the other side helps smartphone users supplement their income on the go.

To the company's credit, it has already been able to supplement monthly income of several thousand people by over a third and that explains how the company has acquired tens of thousands of 100 percent organic downloads.

"We strongly believe in the power of the sharing economy. The world has seen how the likes of Airbnb and Uber have created a new source of income and we want to be right up there with them," said CEO Playment, Siddharth Mall.

"We're building a platform where humans and machines can work together to solve problems which were previously unsolvable at scale. To enable this, we are using cutting edge technology, to build systems that can provide an awesome experience to thousands of our players who play on the app throughout the day. To be able to do that, we would be investing a lot in building a world class product and engineering team," added Siddharth Mall.

"We're very excited about team Playment's discovery of what we believe to be a massive market opportunity. Moreover, we feel it's the best team for the job as the co-founders have strong technical backgrounds and knowledge of the space via their Flipkart experience," said Principal SAIF Partners, Mayank Khanduja.

While the platform is still in early stages, it's power lies in the ability to generate direct and recurring cash earnings for anyone with a smartphone within minutes of coming on the platform. India is a fast growing emerging market with lots of ambitious people and we believe the masses would get addicted to Playment," added Mayank Khanduja.