When Anjali Sardana walked into a pitch meeting this past February, she had maybe twenty minutes to convince Lachy Groom why he should write a check. The result? A $20 million investment that pushed her Bengaluru-based home services startup, Pronto, to a $200 million valuation—exactly twice what it was worth just eight weeks earlier.
That kind of velocity would give most founders whiplash. For Sardana, 24, who cut her teeth at Bain Capital and 8VC before striking out on her own, it's apparently just the beginning.
Pronto closed the second tranche of its Series B round on May 7, bringing total fundraising to roughly $56 million since launching in 2025. The extension, led by Groom—who also co-founded robotics AI firm Physical Intelligence—arrived on the heels of a $25 million initial close in early March. That first slice, led by Epiq Capital with backing from General Catalyst, Glade Brook Capital, and Bain Capital Ventures, had valued the company at $100 million.
The math speaks to investor appetite, perhaps, more than proven profitability. Still, the bet reflects something genuine: a belief that India's fragmented home services sector is ripe for consolidation, and that Pronto might be the company to do it.
The Numbers Behind the Hype
Pronto's pitch is straightforward—instant access to household help through an app. Need someone to wash dishes, clean bathrooms, fold laundry, or cook dinner? Book a service professional on demand. The company operates across 15 cities now, including the usual suspects: Bengaluru, Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Chennai, Pune.
Daily bookings have climbed to around 26,000, up from 18,000 in early March, according to reports from Moneycontrol and ETEntrepreneur. The network of service workers expanded more dramatically—from 1,440 in January to 6,500 by May. That's more than fourfold growth in four months, a pace that raises questions about quality control and worker retention even as it impresses on paper.
A Morgan Stanley note cited by ETtech pegged Pronto's monthly active users at 2.7 million in March, with a 43 percent share of app downloads in the instant home services category that month. For context, that puts it ahead of Urban Company's InstaHelp and rival Snabbit, at least in download velocity.
Whether those users stick around—and whether they generate enough repeat business to justify the valuation—is the bet investors are making.
What Caught Groom's Eye
The February meeting that sealed the extension wasn't some marathon due diligence session. Paul Hudson, founder of Glade Brook Capital, made the introduction. Sardana delivered what seems to have been a concise, compelling pitch. Groom committed shortly after.
"Pronto's ambition is to build the world's largest labor organisation platform," Groom said in a statement. "Anjali and the team are doing it at a level I haven't seen elsewhere in this space."
That phrase—"labor organisation platform"—is doing a lot of work. It hints at something bigger than a service marketplace: infrastructure to manage, train, deploy, and possibly even employ millions of gig workers across categories. Ambitious, certainly. Realistic? We'll see.
Sardana's relative youth hasn't seemed to faze backers. If anything, her trajectory from venture capital roles to founder mirrors a familiar pattern in India's startup ecosystem, where fast operators with network access can raise capital quickly—sometimes faster than unit economics would warrant.
A Crowded, Heated Market
Pronto isn't operating in a vacuum. The instant home services space in India is suddenly flush with cash and competition. Snabbit raised a $56 million Series D in late April, while Urban Company's InstaHelp reportedly crossed 50,000 daily bookings in February—nearly double Pronto's current run rate.
Bank of America analysts estimate the instant home services market could swell to $15 billion to $18 billion by 2030. That's a big prize, and everyone knows it. The question isn't whether the market exists—it clearly does—but who will own it, and at what cost.
Pronto's strategy, at least for now, seems focused on depth over breadth. The company plans to use the fresh capital to scale worker supply and strengthen operational infrastructure in existing cities rather than charging into new geographies. It's piloting home-cook services in Bengaluru and testing expansions into car washing and gardening, but the emphasis is on density: more workers, more repeat customers, tighter unit economics in the metros it already serves.
"We're focused on strengthening our foothold over the next six months," the company told Inc42, a signal that geographical expansion may wait while the core business proves itself.
The Unseen Challenges
What the funding announcements don't capture are the operational headaches that come with scaling a labor marketplace this fast. Onboarding, training, and retaining thousands of service workers across more than a dozen cities isn't trivial. Neither is managing quality, handling customer complaints, or navigating India's complex labor regulations.
Then there's the question of margins. Home services platforms often operate on thin economics, squeezed between what customers will pay and what workers demand. Venture capital can subsidize growth for a while—long enough, hopefully, to achieve the scale and network effects that make the business defensible. But at some point, the unit economics need to work.
Pronto's rapid valuation ascent suggests investors believe it will get there. Whether Sardana and her team can deliver on that belief is the story yet to unfold.
For now, at least, the momentum is real.
