India has always had a large, informal gig workforce, but COVID-19 brought this workforce into the limelight.
An ASSOCHAM report states that there are up to 15 million freelance or gig workers across India, working across sectors such as ecommerce, technology, home services, food & beverages, and more. However, the true potential of this reserve remains untapped because of its unorganised structure.
Noida-based B2B platform aims to change that.
The crowdsourcing platform helps small, medium, and large enterprises connect with on-demand field technicians or freelancers, with expertise in telecom, home appliances, IoT, and more.
Founded by Dheeraj Khatter, Kshitiz Saini, and Himanshu Kumar in 2018, the startup supports more than 50,000 gig workers and has helped them find contract-based employment in over 100 enterprises, including Airtel, Jio, Nokia, BFSI, Flipkart, Panasonic, and more.
MyMobiForce works as a matchmaker, forging connections between enterprises looking for a team with a particular skill set and gig workers seeking work. It taps artificial intelligence and technology to help businesses keep track of the hired workforce, get regular performance reports, and scale effectively in a plug-and-play fashion.
In July 2021, MyMobiForce raised $1.5 million in a pre-Series A round led by Bharat Inclusion Seed Fund, with participation from a group of angels led by Manu Iyer of Bluehill Capital, Acsys Investments, and Ashutosh Agrawal (ex-Urban Company).
Adoption in new verticals
According to a 2021 joint report by the Boston Consulting Group and Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, the gig economy can service up to 90 million jobs in India’s non-farm economy alone. This translates to “over $250 billion in the volume of work and may contribute an incremental 1.25 percent to India’s GDP”.
Saras Agarwal, Principal at Bharat Fund, says, “India is the fifth largest market employing 3.3 million flexi staff, growing at 22.7 percent CAGR despite 0.6 percent penetration, which is much behind the global average of 2.3 percent.”
“MyMobiForce’s tech platform allows any business to digitally filter, connect, skill, monitor, and empower the field workforce to complete technical jobs at a pan-India level. We partnered with MyMobiForce in 2021, and since then the company has seen tremendous adoption in new verticals such as electronics, electricals, white goods, ecommerce etc. and has seen good adoption of its digital platform on the technician side,” Saras adds.
Since its last funding round, MyMobiForce has worked on its quality of service and automation.
The team onboarded domain experts and operation heads to help the startup go deep into existing business verticals, such as white goods, telecom, and networking. It expanded and strengthened fleets in existing categories and emerging markets like EV charging, solar, IoT, and drones.
The startup also grew its presence from 100 to more than 250 cities, and claims to have clocked 3X growth.
MyMobiForce helps small, medium, and large enterprises connect with on-demand field technicians or freelancers.
The vision and impact
The founders of MyMobiForce met during their time at HCL India and conceived the idea of giving a structure to India’s growing gig economy.
“We realised that tech could solve the inefficiencies existing in the gig economy, connect it with different organisations while ensuring the social security and skill growth of gig workers,” says Dheeraj, Co-founder.
The co-founders envisioned building an organised marketplace that helped both gig workers and enterprises.
MyMobiForce, which has a team of around 100 people, uses deep tech to help enterprises go beyond outsourcing. It adopts a crowdsourcing model to help businesses find the right experts and technicians for pan-India implementation and maintenance projects.
Companies that employ these workers through MyMobiForce have to pay a commission along with pay/wage for workers hired after the completion of each project. The commission is usually between 25 and 40 percent, depending on the complexity of the work involved.
Gig workers associated with the platform are paid on a weekly basis, and digital wallets help them keep track of the payments they receive for their work.
MyMobiForce also helps workers with employment enhancing training, and access to financial products such as insurance, savings, and microloans.
Bringing discipline to the gig community was one of the challenges the team faced while creating the deeptech platform. This includes making sure workers work within timelines and deadlines, follow up with clients, and maintain proper hygiene and clothing standards.
The team is constantly trying to improve its matchmaking algorithm to make sure businesses find the right talent and skillset in their vicinity easily.
Future plans
According to Statista, the projected gross volume of the global gig economy in 2023 is expected to reach $455.2 billion. India’s gig sector is likely to grow to $455 billion at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 17 percent by 2024.
The Assocham report states it has the potential to grow at least 2X the pre-pandemic estimates.
The opportunity is huge, and MyMobiForce, which competes with the likes of Yelp for Business, InnoCentive, OpenIDEO, Amazon Mechanical Turk and others, is working hard to tap it.
The on-demand recruitment network has plans to raise more funds to ramp up operations, expand to other countries, and grow across new verticals.
It will also focus on new technology investments, strengthening onboarding function, sales and marketing, and training infrastructure to ensure steady supply and availability of skilled manpower as the business scales.
