The pitch lasted twenty minutes. The check arrived three months later for $20 million.
That's how Lachy Groom, the solo Silicon Valley investor who backed quick-commerce darling Zepto early, decided to extend Pronto's Series B round in May—lifting the Indian home-services startup's valuation to roughly $200 million and doubling it in a span that barely covers a fiscal quarter. For a company founded in early 2025, the math is dizzying. For investors watching India's instant-services gold rush, perhaps it's unsurprising.
Pronto operates in a space that sounds deceptively simple: on-demand house help. Cleaning. Laundry. Utensils. Kitchen prep. Think of it as instant delivery, but for labor instead of groceries. Book through an app, and the company promises a verified "Pro" at your door within 15 minutes. By May 7, the startup claimed it was handling around 26,000 bookings daily—up from 18,000 as of March 3, according to figures cited by Moneycontrol.
The extension, led entirely by Groom, brings Pronto's Series B to $45 million. That initial $25 million tranche closed March 3, led by Epiq Capital with backing from General Catalyst, Glade Brook Capital, and Bain Capital Ventures. At the time, the startup carried a post-money valuation of about $100 million, per Moneycontrol. Eight weeks later, that number had doubled.
All told, Pronto has raised somewhere between $58 million and $60 million since its founding, according to ETtech and Moneycontrol. The trajectory has been steep: a $2 million seed from Bain Capital Ventures pegged the company at roughly $12.5 million post-money. By the Series A in August—co-led by General Catalyst and Glade Brook—it had climbed to $45 million. An eight-fold jump from seed to Series B, TechCrunch reported.
The Founder and the Footnote
Anjali Sardana is 24. She spent time at Bain Capital and 8VC before starting Pronto, and she's now navigating the peculiar challenge of scaling a marketplace where the product is people—and people don't scale neatly.
Supply is the bottleneck. The company's base of service professionals grew from 1,440 in January to 4,500 by February, then 6,500 by early May, according to Moneycontrol. Utilization runs above 65%, which suggests demand isn't the problem. About 60% of new workers arrive via referrals, a sign that word-of-mouth matters as much in labor markets as it does in consumer apps.
Average order value hovers between Rs 130 and Rs 140—roughly $1.50 to $1.70. Orders climbed 40% month-over-month in the early months of 2026, ETtech noted. The company burned just over $8 million in the past year and said in March it had "well over two years of runway" after the initial Series B close.
Pronto relocated its headquarters from Gurugram to Bengaluru's HSR Layout in November, chasing tech talent. Customer support stayed in the north. The company now operates in 10 to 15 cities—its website lists 15, including Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Hyderabad—though the exact footprint varies depending on the source.
The startup is piloting adjacent services: car washing, gardening, home cooks. Small tests, not grand rollouts. For now, the focus remains density over breadth.
A Category Heating Up Fast
Pronto isn't alone in this race. Urban Company launched InstaHelp, its instant-booking arm. Snabbit, a direct competitor, raised a $56 million Series D in late April at a valuation between $350 million and $390 million, per Moneycontrol. The competitive intensity is visible in the numbers: a Morgan Stanley note estimated March monthly active users across the category at 10.4 million, with Urban Company claiming 6.5 million, Pronto at 2.7 million, and Snabbit at 1.2 million.
App downloads tell a different story. Pronto grabbed 43% share in March, ahead of Urban Company's 31% and Snabbit's 26%, according to the same analyst note. Whether downloads convert to sustained usage is another question.
The sector's collective burn rate rose from around $7 million to $8 million in December to $11 million to $12 million by February, ETtech reported. That's the cost of acquiring supply and building density—two things you can't fake in a labor marketplace.
Projections vary, but the optimism is consistent. Bank of America estimates instant home services could hit $15 billion to $18 billion by 2030. RedSeer puts the instant house-help segment specifically at around Rs 8,500 crore—roughly $1 billion—by FY30, per ETtech. Jefferies pegs India's broader home-services market at $60 billion in 2024-25, growing to $100 billion by 2029-30, though that figure sweeps in non-instant, non-tech-enabled players.
The question isn't whether the market exists. It's whether these companies can capture it profitably.
The Groom Connection
Lachy Groom's entry came through an introduction from Paul Hudson of Glade Brook. The pitch happened in February. Twenty minutes, Sardana and Groom in conversation. By May, the deal was done.
Groom, a former Stripe executive and cofounder of robotics AI firm Physical Intelligence, made his name backing Zepto early—the quick-commerce upstart that became one of India's breakout startup stories. His willingness to write a $20 million check on his own suggests he sees similar momentum here, though the operational complexity is higher. Groceries don't call in sick or need training.
What Comes Next
Pronto plans to use the fresh capital to scale its worker base through referral incentives, deepen operational infrastructure, and expand service density in existing markets, Sardana told Moneycontrol. There's no talk of aggressive geographic expansion yet—just tightening the core.
The two-month valuation double is a vote of confidence, but it's also a reminder of how fast expectations can inflate in a hot category. Pronto burned just over $8 million in the past year. The real test is whether it can maintain growth while managing the variable costs of a labor marketplace at scale—where every booking is a human being, not a SKU.
For now, investors seem willing to bet that instant services are India's next consumer obsession. Whether the economics work at scale remains the open question. Twenty-minute pitches are one thing. Building a sustainable business around instant labor is quite another.
