Snabbit Focuses on Safety, Workforce-led Model as Competition Intensifies in Quick Home-Services Market
Snabbit, a startup offering instant domestic help, says it is processing about 35,000 jobs a day as competition intensifies in the emerging quick home-services market . Founder and CEO Aayush Agarwal said on Friday that the company is focusing on building a safety and workforce-led model rather than chasing rapid customer acquisition in a capital-heavy sector. “We’re not in the land-grab game,” Agarwal said in an interaction. “We’re just going to quietly build for the long term.” The category has attracted more than $100 million in venture capital over the past 18 months as companies race to build platforms offering quick access to cleaners and other household help. Industry estimates suggest monthly cash burn across players has reached $7-8 million. One startup, Pync, shut down earlier this year. Agarwal said that instant home services differs structurally from other platform businesses such as food delivery or ride-hailing. Those services involve short interactions at the doorstep or inside a vehicle, whereas domestic-help platforms require workers to spend extended periods inside customers’ homes. “The product is not a packet of chips arriving in ten minutes. It is a woman standing in a stranger’s kitchen for an hour,” he said. Snabbit currently has around 12,000 experts, all women, operating across 110-115 PIN codes in NCR, Mumbai, Bengaluru and Pune. The company believes worker safety, rather than heavy discounting to attract users, will determine which platforms sustain in the category. To address this, the company has developed a safety layer called Kavach that runs on workers’ devices. The system monitors signals such as loud noises or unusual device movement and uses machine-learning models to identify potential distress situations. When thresholds are crossed, the device prompts the worker to confirm whether she is safe. If there is no response or the worker indicates distress, an SOS protocol is triggered and a response team attempts contact while local support is dispatched. Workers can also activate the alert by pressing a phone button sequence, shaking the device or issuing a voice command. Agarwal said audio signals are processed only for safety purposes and deleted within 48 hours. The company plans to open-source the framework. “Safety is not proprietary. Safety should be highly democratised,” he said. Snabbit also recently partnered with a non-banking financial company to provide micro-loans of Rs 25,000 to workers. More than Rs 20 lakh has been disbursed within weeks of the programme’s launch. The platform operates as a marketplace model where customers pay for services and the worker receives the earnings after the platform retains a margin. Agarwal said average monthly earnings are about Rs 20,000, with peak earnings ranging between Rs 40,000 and Rs 60,000. Industry data suggest Snabbit and Urban Company’s InstaHelp are currently the largest players in the segment. Snabbit processed about 830,000 orders in February, while InstaHelp completed roughly 800,000 and Pronto about 350,000. The rapid scale has come with heavy spending. Urban Company reported an adjusted Ebitda loss of Rs 61 crore from InstaHelp in the December quarter, while Pronto, which raised $25 million at a $100-million valuation this month, has reportedly burned about $8 million in its first year. Snabbit has raised about $56 million so far and was last valued at $180 million. It is also in discussions to raise another $100-120 million. “In our category, the expert base is not just another line item,” Agarwal said. “It is the only line item.”
