Pronto raises $25 million in funding led by Epiq Capital as 10-minute home services scales up

Pronto raises $25 million in funding led by Epiq Capital as 10-minute home services scales up

Quick home services startup Pronto has raised $25 million in a Series B round led by Epiq Capital, as investor appetite intensifies for instant household help platforms competing to build scale across Indian metros.

Existing backers Glade Brook Capital, General Catalyst and Bain Capital Ventures also participated in the round, which values the company at $100 million post-money, founder Anjali Sardana told Moneycontrol.

Moneycontrol was the first to report, in December last year, that the company was in talks to raise $25 million at a $100 million valuation. 

The raise comes amid a broader land grab in the quick home services segment, where startups are racing to build dense, hyperlocal networks of trained domestic workers capable of reaching households within minutes.

Scaling fast, supply constrained

Founded in 2025, Pronto connects urban households with background-verified professionals for tasks such as cleaning, laundry, utensil washing and basic meal preparation. The company has expanded from one city to 10 in seven months and grown from five micromarkets to more than 150.

Daily bookings have surged from roughly 1,000 to 18,000, with demand growing at over 20 percent week-on-week. In February, Pronto had 4,500 active professionals who completed at least one booking during the month, with 2,500–3,000 professionals working on any given day.

Despite the rapid scale-up, Sardana said the company burned about $8 million in its first year of operations.

“We’ve only burned $8 million in the first kind of year of the company. That being said, we’re doubling down on growth, and that will require capital, especially around scaling supply,” she said.

Pronto remains “deeply supply constrained”, she added, noting that professionals complete an average of seven bookings per day. “We’re growing demand at 20 percent week on week. But there’s only so much juice you can squeeze from increasing utilization. The rest has to come from scaling supply.”

At the current burn rate, the fresh capital gives the company “well over two years of runway,” Sardana said.

Capital to build the workforce

Unlike quick commerce players that invest heavily in physical dark stores, Pronto describes itself as a largely variable-cost business. The bulk of the new funds will be deployed towards top-of-funnel supply acquisition, especially referral incentives.

Sardana said referrals are now the company’s largest channel for onboarding professionals, aided by high net promoter scores (NPS) among workers, or “Pros” as the company calls them.

“If demand is growing 20 percent week-on-week, supply also needs to grow 20 percent week-on-week. Vendors and field recruiters are relatively static. Referrals are the one channel that compounds,” she said.

The company’s customer acquisition cost stands at around Rs 400, though Sardana declined to disclose overall marketing spends.

At a micromarket level — typically a 1.5–2 kilometre radius — Pronto has clusters delivering over 500 bookings per day. In Gurugram, utilisation crossed 60 percent in January, with older micromarkets already above break-even, according to Sardana.

“Utilization is the name of the game,” she said, adding that quality and frequency, rather than aggressive discounting, would determine long-term success.

Category heats up

Pronto’s raise follows a flurry of activity in the segment. Rival Snabbit recently closed a $30 million Series C round at a valuation of about $180 million, more than doubling its valuation within months as it scaled across metros.

Meanwhile, listed home services platform Urban Company has been investing heavily in its instant vertical, InstaHelp. The company reported that the new vertical burned Rs 61 crore in the December quarter even as revenue climbed, dragging overall margins as it competes more aggressively in high-frequency categories.

The parallels to early quick commerce — where multiple startups raised back-to-back rounds amid high burn and intense competition — have become hard to ignore.

“In a lot of ways, there are similar dynamics,” Sardana said. “But total aggregate burn should be lower because there’s less capex and more variable cost. The cost structure is more in our favour.”

Betting on quality over capital

With multiple well-funded players expanding simultaneously, Sardana believes differentiation will come down to service quality rather than capital alone.

“It’s 100 percent quality,” she said. “Here we have a person coming inside your home and performing a service. Quality matters a ton. Quality compounds over time. It’s not something you can flip on and off.”

The company’s top 1 percent of customers use the platform more than 23 times a month, while the top 10 percent use it nine or more times monthly, she said — a sign that frequency rises sharply once trust is established.

While consolidation is possible over time, Sardana said it is “very difficult to tell today” whether the market will narrow to a few players.

For now, the focus remains on expanding supply, deepening density in existing clusters and entering new cities over the next 12–18 months.

As investor interest surges and incumbents step up spending, India’s domestic help market — long dominated by informal, word-of-mouth networks — is rapidly formalising into a high-stakes, capital-backed battle for frequency and trust inside urban homes.