Company, customers, and professionals can all win: Pronto's Anjali Sardana

Pronto's 23-year-old founder says daily bookings have grown 18-fold in seven months, as the startup targets 70,000 bookings a day by June

Urban households in India still largely rely on referrals and informal arrangements to find domestic help. Anjali Sardana, 23, founder and chief executive of Pronto, is trying to organise that fragmented market with a platform that connects households with trained professionals who can arrive within minutes. The startup recently raised $25 million, led by Epiq Capital, as daily bookings climbed from roughly 1,000 to more than 18,000 in seven months. In a video interview with Peerzada Abrar, Sardana discusses scaling instant home services, building reliable supply networks, and why she believes the gig economy need not be a trade-off between workers and profit. Edited excerpts:

Q: What motivated you to start Pronto?

I am 23. I graduated college in May 2024, and about eight months later I started Pronto. In my final year, I got deeply obsessed with this problem statement — solving this problem for both consumers and workers in this segment. For consumers, it's the inability to find high-quality, reliable help, and for workers it's income instability, underemployment, lack of safety, and the need to build a platform that we truly believe is win-win-win. Consumers are able to get the services they need. Workers don't suffer from underemployment or income instability and get that safety and dignity, and obviously us in the middle benefiting as well.

Q: You raised $25 million in a new round. What is your capital deployment strategy, and how will you balance growth against unit economics?

We raised $25 million at a $100 million post-money valuation. Today we are deeply supply-constrained. Our utilisation is very high. We're at around seven bookings per day per professional on the platform, and we're scaling demand at 20 per cent week-on-week. There's very little leverage left in increasing bookings per day per professional, so a lot of that has to come from acquisition of new professionals and bringing more people onto the platform. Another thing we're investing in is going deeper into existing micromarkets. 

On unit economics, I think at this time we're largely focused on building frequency and retention and really building this as a habit with our customers. That being said, we are always a very cost-conscious company. We only burned $8 million in our first year, and I think that takes a lot of cost discipline.

Q: Bookings have grown from 1,000 to over 18,000 in seven months. What do your unit economics look like, and are you seeing margin improvement as you scale?

By June 2026, we expect to be averaging 70,000 bookings per day. For us, it's really just about supply acquisition and maintaining our high-quality bar. We focus a ton on quality, and we see that come through in repeat rates. We still have our four-day in-person training and significant performance management functions. The result: our top one per cent of customers use us on average 23-plus times a month. Our top 10 per cent use is nine-plus times a month.

If you think about the missing-for-the-day market, that's a one-to-three-times-a-month use case versus the primary and only household help — that's 25-to-30 times a month.

Q: The space has players like Urban Company and Snabbit. Why did previous players struggle, and what are you doing differently?

The infrastructure is finally in place for something like this to be built — on the tech side, and also the quick commerce infrastructure, the payments infrastructure, the identity infrastructure, the logistics infrastructure. A lot of previous attempts were hands-off — just a matching platform. But matching is only one piece of the puzzle. We also focus heavily on the experience of our pros. We have a monthly retention rate of over 70 per cent for our professionals.

Q5: What are the biggest operational challenges during hypergrowth, and what is your playbook for expansion?

We've built robust processes and checks around quality — including a lot of checks and audits on quality as we scale. About 50 per cent of our demand comes from NCR. Twenty-five percent comes from Gurugram alone. Most of the focus is on going deeper in existing markets. Our top four markets — NCR, Bengaluru, Mumbai, and Pune — will receive more attention. We are continuing to hire engineers across engineering and product.

Q: How do you structure your relationship with service providers, and how are you thinking about worker benefits and regulatory risk?

We are building a different sort of business where the experience of our professionals is front and centre. Our number one priority is providing the best possible experience for our professionals and making sure there is very high professional NPS. We've seen that come through in referrals as an acquisition channel. We feel it is very possible to build a business where the company, the customers, and the professionals can all win — it doesn't have to be a trade-off.