Vahan, an artificial intelligence enabled platform that provides blue collar jobs via WhatsApp, on Friday announced that it has reached an important milestone of providing employment opportunities to over 1 lakh blue-collared professionals. The Y Combinator-backed startup provided these job opportunities through its WhatsApp API enabled Chabot solution called Mitra.
With this milestone, Vahan has registered 400% increase in job placement since 2020. These workers have been placed in several blue/grey-collared jobs in sectors such as logistics, delivery and BPOs , the company said in the press release.
Vahan claims that it is placing placing 5000 people every month and is growing at the rate of 25% per month. Furthermore, it claims that it has added 5 million users on its platform and is adding 2.5 lakh people every month.
Talking about the benefits of Vahan, Asha, a job seeker, said, “My husband and I both lost our jobs during the pandemic and were struggling to make ends meet. This is when someone advised me to reach out to ‘Mitra’ who found me a job in just one day. ‘Mitra’ is a godsend for people like us who struggle to find jobs matching their skills and often get harassed by middlemen. It is unbelievable that I can find jobs on WhatsApp itself!”
According to Madhav Krishna, Founder and CEO, Vahan, “The blue-collar segment is an underserved market in India despite constituting the bulk of the workforce. Our partnership with WhatsApp allows us to seamlessly connect employers and job seekers thereby facilitating better livelihoods and financial inclusion especially for underprivileged households.”
Vahan is essentially a recruitment startup but one that heavily leverages the power of WhatsApp alongside machine learning and artificial intelligence to help companies in hiring blue-collar professionals at scale.
Vahan had raised undisclosed amount of funding from Khosla Ventures and other investors in October 2019. The startup was a part of the Y Combinator summer 2019 batch.
It must be noted that Airtel had announced in October 2019 that it would pick up 8.8% stake in Vahan, making the Bengaluru-based startup one of the few startups to be backed by the Airtel Accelerator program.
Vahan competes with startups like Better Place and Apna, with the latter raising $12.5Mn barely a few days back.