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LocalOye, a mobile marketplace for hiring local service professionals, on Wednesday announced shifting its headquarters to Bengaluru from Mumbai and launched its operations in the city with around 20 services.
Started in 2013 by Aditya Rao, an alumnus of BITS Pilani, the start-up offers discovering and booking local services around health and beauty, tutorials, plumbing and electrician, and home maintenance. Once the requirements have been posted by the user, vendors are notified and the user details like budget, location, timing, among others are sent to them. After a service provider accepts the lead, the company connects both the vendor and the customer, lessening the customer’s pain-point to search and choose.
The start-up, which recently ditched web-based platform to focus only on its mobile application, uses an advanced recommendation engine to connect customers with service professionals.
Rao said after relocating the headquarters to Bengaluru, the company is hoping to grow the team here much faster.
“Now that we have set up our base in Bengaluru, we will ramp up our team from 25 to 150 employees in the coming months. It would have probably taken us 18-24 months in Mumbai, but in Bengaluru we should be able to grow much quicker,” he added.
Till date, LocalOye has served over 100,000 customers with 28 per cent repeat rate and 3,000 merchants with an average wallet size of Rs 7,000 spread across 250 categories in Mumbai.
LocalOye had, in April, concluded its Series A funding of $5 million (Rs 32 crore) from Tiger Global Management and Lightspeed Venture Partners.
Availability of trained technology skillsets in Bangaluru, of late, is attracting technology start-ups to relocate their operations to the IT city from other cities. Last year, Quikr, a classified portal had announced it shifting its base to Bengaluru with an aim of growing its team quickly.
