Chennai, NFAPost: Zuper, a platform for intelligent workforce management, has raised $1.1 million in seed funding, led by Prime Venture Partners and participation from Gunderson Dettemer and Gemba Capital. Zuper is a SaaS-based, mobile-first workforce management platform that helps service businesses to modernise operations and provide on-demand customer experience.
The company is planning to use the fresh funds to aggressively grow and expand in North America, UK and Southeast Asia. It is also looking to hire across all functions in the US and in India.
Since its founding in 2016, Zuper has been used by thousands of users worldwide and has processed over two million work orders. Zuper currently operates in six countries – India, UAE, US, UK, Singapore and US. The enterprises and mid-sized businesses using Zuper across thousands of employees have benefited from significant operational advantages including a 50% increase in workforce utilization, 35% reduction in service turnaround time, 45% increase in customer adoption and profitability, and 30% reduction in costs.
Zuper was founded in August 2016 with offices in Seattle, US and Chennai by Raghav Gurumani, Karthik Rao and Vijay Narasiman. Anand Subbaraj, joined Zuper as a CEO in 2020 having spent more than 13 years in Microsoft as a Head of Product in Azure Data.
The company has also launched COVID-19 Compliance Pack for businesses to manage operations post lockdown. The solution helps businesses across different industries ensure their workforce stays compliant and up-to-date with the latest COVID-19 protocols and guidelines.
Zuper’s intelligent workforce management platform helps service organisations manage, modernize and transform the field and remote workforce. By leveraging the power of AI and Machine Learning, Zuper helps organisations improve productivity and utilization of the workforce by automating repetitive tasks that impact efficiency.
The Zuper Platform includes a white-labeled mobile and web application for a modern consumer experience, back-office application to manage, govern and operationalise the workforces, native mobile applications in iOS and Android for workforce collaboration and service 360 to grow business with data.
The Global Home Services Market is expected to witness a growth of 18.91% from 2019-2026 and reach $ 1,133.40 billion by 2026 according to Verified Market Research.
When it comes to the service industry, most companies fail to provide a consistent, informed and best experience to its customers across all channels of communication. There are no effective mechanisms to track employees, their locations and work progress and there is near to zero visibility on the field-workforce.
Customer behaviour and expectations are changing rapidly in the new world, and companies need to recognise these changes and evolve, by personalising the experience and giving them real-time alerts with ETA for delays and other inefficiencies.
“We want to enable service businesses to offer a better customer experience and modernize the end to end service process and workflows. We formulated our hypothesis based on our own experiences with customer service and started reaching out to service businesses in different parts of the world to understand the relevance of the problem statement and saw the opportunity in hand,” Zuper Co-founder and CEO Anand Subbaraj said.
“We soon realised that it was a huge global problem that needs to be tackled at scale using a modern technology solution. Through Zuper, we want to enable service organisations to offer the best experience to its customers and improve the productivity and the efficiency of the workforce,” he added.
With this investment, Prime Venture Partners has invested in nine startups in the SaaS sector including MyGate, Quizizz, and HackerEarth. The early stage fund, led by serial entrepreneurs Shripati Acharya, Sanjay Swamy and Amit Somani focuses on startups that not only need capital but also require mentoring to transform them into disruptive companies.
The fund has a portfolio of more than 25 companies spread across sectors such as Fintech, SaaS, Healthcare, Consumer, B2B etc. and recently announced the addition of Ashish Gupta as Partner Emeritus to further strengthen its investment team.
Prime Venture Partners Managing Partner Shripati Acharya said, “SMBs are experiencing two powerful trends – they now manage an increasingly distributed workforce while their customers expect an on-demand service experience.”
“Zuper’s mobile first, intelligent workforce management solution provides SMBs with complete visibility to what work is being scheduled where, to which partner and its current status. At the same time their end customers are able to request, pay and track the order through a few taps on their mobile. The pandemic has further accelerated this trend and with it the demand for Zuper’s solution,” he added.
