Title Urban company.pdf ✅

121-041 Urban Company 2 Bhal considered the future of the company as he signed the latest email approval for employees to receive curfew passes from state governments.b Urban Company had to operate in an uncertain world and think about an equally nebulous future. History of Urban Company Bhal, Raghav Chandra, and Varun Khaitan met during the early years of their career. Bhal and Khaitan had studied engineering at IIT Kanpur. Khaitan’s first job was at the technology company Qualcomm in San Diego, working on wireless technologies for indoor mobile connectivity. “I got a huge high from using my capabilities to make lives for so many people better. I decided that this is a great purpose to dedicate the rest of my life to. I wanted to create more and more impact in the lives of not a few thousands, but hundreds of millions of people,” Khaitan said. Bhal, meanwhile, studied for an MBA at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, and then he and Khaitan both joined consultancy firm Boston Consulting Group. Chandra had studied computer science and engineering at UC Berkeley, California, and worked at Twitter. Seeing marketplaces like Uber and Airbnb take over former Internet giants like Craiglist was very significant for Chandra. “As a techie,” he said, “I was right in the lap of marketplaces being born. I realized that technology is not just virtual, but about influencing real-world businesses around you.” When he came back to India, he was clear about his aim. “I wanted to do something meaningful, and the same goes for Abhiraj and Varun. We wanted to solve the Indian problems we had grown up with.” Bhal thought about the impact a technology-led company could make. “Home services felt like the last bastion of the Internet, the one sector the Internet had not been able to capture, anywhere in the world. We saw a massive opportunity for a technology-first company to come in, change things, and create a large business in the process,” Bhal said. (See Exhibit 1 for market size, and macroeconomic data on India.) The three met through the entrepreneurial business community in New Delhi and decided to work together. The purpose came before the idea. “We knew that the country was at the cusp of change, and we should not only be the part of that change but should also be leading it,” Khaitan said. “We should be creating the companies of the future that will transform the country.” After exploring a variety of industries, including transport and entertainment, Bhal, Chandra and Khaitan decided on home services: cleaning, plumbing, beauty services, all delivered at one’s doorstep. It was a large industry and mattered a lot to consumers, who relied on professionals for small repair needs around the house and spent a significant portion of their income on these home services. The sector was still a disorganized one, however. Service professionals were not properly trained, and worked for low wages. With no salary growth or social security, they had little incentive to provide good service. Home services had also not been offered in India through online platforms yet. The opportunity to professionalize the industry and standardize and at scale it through a digital platform, was large. In November 2014, the founders began Urban Company (then called UrbanClap) as a home services listings and match-making website. In early 2015, Urban Company raised an investment of $1.5 million from Accel Partners, a U.S.-based venture capital firm with an office in Bengaluru, India; and Elevation b During the nationwide coronavirus lockdown, India’s state governments required essential service and business operators to sign up for curfew passes for their workers to travel out of home, and through the city. This document is authorized for use only in Prof. Varisha Rehman's MARKETING MANAGEMENT 1 at Indian Institute of Technology - Madras from Aug 2025 to Feb 2026.