Bengaluru and San Francisco based software development community Indiez has raked up $500,000 (around Rs 3.2 crore) in seed funding round from Haresh Chawla, partner in venture capital firm True North (formerly known as India Value Fund). Another unnamed angel investor also participated in the seed funding round.
The founders have claimed that they were able seal the deal after a 4 hour long meeting with Haresh and the other partner. Both have reportedly invested in the startup in their personal capacities. The seed funding will come as a real shot in the arm for Indiez, which till now was bootstrapped.
Nitesh Agrawal, co-founder of Indiez, informed one of the blogging websites that the startup will use the funds to further expand its technological capabilities and expand presence in the U.S. market.
Indiez is basically an invite-only community of software designers. The online platform recruits only talented designers & developers from across the world for various short term projects. The startup was founded in 2016 by four IIT Powai (Mumbai) batchmates – Nitesh, Ishan Shrivastava, Archit Kejriwal, and Amrose Birani. All founders together have extensively worked in quite a few well- known startups like Housing.com, UpGrad and Ola.
Today Indiez claims that it has over 300 freelancers on its platform, either working on a part time or full time basis. The startup also claims that many of its designers and developers are from well-known tech companies like Google, Facebook, Spotify, Uber, and WeChat. The presence of such sought after developer ensures that Indiez is able to deliver quality projects to all its clients.
Indiez has also put in place very tough selection criteria to ensure that only highly skilled & talented designers/developers are recruited on its platform. The company claims to select only 5 percent of the total applicants that are invited for the interview.