CEO Aayush Agarwal told Mint that his startup plans to move into newer verticals like home cooks, childcare and senior care in the coming months as it grows. The company currently services Mumbai, Thane, Noida, Gurugram, Bengaluru and Pune.
The company is not yet profitable. Agarwal said his primary costs currently include staff training, software operations for the app and salaries.
“It’s a very lean model that we run because we have no warehouses, no inventory, no third-party logistics, no separate last mile and no working capital cycles,” Agarwal said. “It’s about as capital efficient as it gets among consumer Internet companies.”
The Bengaluru-based startup has raised $25.5 million in three rounds, with Lightspeed leading the last $19 million. Other investors include Elevation Capital and Nexus Venture Partners.
Snabbit is a quick-service platform that connects urban households with trained and certified domestic help on demand – usually within 10 minutes – for household chores such as cleaning, dishwashing, laundry, bathroom and kitchen cleaning, with the ability to schedule slots and combine multiple tasks into a single hourly booking.
Agarwal said Snabbit started as an abandoned business that he got involved with ₹65 million in personal savings in March last year. It started with a small team of about 60 domestic helpers – “experts” in Snabbit’s terminology.
Building a business
The company’s first priority was to build a reliable pool of experts by bringing in support workers from his own housing society in Mumbai and training them from his apartment, he said.
“Back then, we didn’t spend much on marketing and left word of mouth to supply the buildings. To get customers, we distributed flyers around the area and by April we had completed the first 100 orders,” he said.
Over the Diwali weekend, Agarwal said Snabbit was completing nearly 15,000 jobs a day, above last month’s usual peak of around 10,000. He added that each job has a realized price ₹220–230.
In its beta phase, Agarwal said the service ran on WhatsApp before the team created a clear product market position in the high-frequency home assistance category.
“After Diwali last year, we watched three consecutive weeks of non-celebratory growth from a base of about 120 jobs per day in our first micromarket (within a small geographic area in Mumbai). That’s when we knew we had a product-market fit and decided to scale because the internal question was whether the growth would be sustained without festivals,” he added.
Snabbit’s repeat rate is about 50%, meaning nearly half of new signups come back and complete a second task within a month, Agarwal said.
On the supply side (gig workers), the company is not optimizing for a single lever, such as excessive daily or monthly incentives; instead, it balances several metrics to ensure stable home help earnings and reliable service quality.
“We’re not chasing a single lever, whether it’s acquisitions, retention or supply-side employee incentives,” Agarwal said. “Our priority is customer experience as measured by NPS (Net Promoter Score), punctuality and service consistency. We monitor dozens of inputs across demand and supply, but we will not optimize one at the expense of the others,” he added.
As of this month, Snabbit has registered approximately 4,000 workers and 2,000 registered users.
The company’s business model works on daily accruals and monthly payouts, as earnings are calculated and loaded daily, but paid out on a monthly cycle to ensure predictable pay, CEO Agarwal said.
On expansion plans in adjacent verticals, Agarwal said the company will add new categories one by one. He added that Snabbit has built a repeatable sales book from its home business and will use the same land-based techniques when entering new categories.
“Launching a new vertical is not capital intensive as capital is needed only after product-market fit is achieved in terms of delivery construction solutions, professional training and customer acquisition. We will use our existing customer base to drive adoption in new verticals as well,” Agarwal said.
Sector scan
In addition to Snabbit, funded players in home services include Urban Company, Pronto and Broomees. Pronto has raised about $2 million from Bain Capital Ventures, while Broomees has raised about $1.1 million from Social Alpha, 100X.VC and angel investors such as Peyush Bansal.
Urban Company trialled the services of a personal chef in Bengaluru in 2021 before discontinuing the offer. In March this year, it launched Insta Maids, a fast, on-demand domestic help similar to Snabbit.
Before 2019, several startups tried to build scale in home services, including Housejoy, LocalOye, Helpr, and Zimmbe. But few made it into the big companies.
“Major Indian consumer platforms are adapting to low AOV (average order value) and high frequency – think food delivery or quick commerce,” said Rahul Taneja, partner at Lightspeed India. “Previously, home service plays built around low-frequency niche tasks didn’t scale as much; the use case for Snabbit’s home help is inherently high, with ‘fast’ as the acceptance hook that later moves to scheduled bookings.”
“This is one of the reasons why we have supported this category despite previous false starts,” added Taneja. “Home help alone is worth $24-30 billion in the value of the top 30 cities.”
But the growing gig economy has drawn criticism over worker complaints of unfair working conditions, safety gaps and incentive pay models that limit guaranteed earnings and push workers to chase bonuses.
Fairwork India Ratings 2024 evaluated digital work platforms on five principles: fair pay, fair conditions, fair contracts, fair management and fair representation and found no platform with a rating higher than 6/10. Bigbasket, Swiggy, Urban Company and Zomato topped the list with 6/10, highlighting industry-wide gaps in workers’ rights, particularly around local living wages and representation. BluSmart (now defunct) and Zepto scored lower, while Amazon Flex, Flipkart, Ola and Porter scored very low or zero.
