On-demand home help firm Snabbit clocks $11 mn ARR, eyes new verticals

Chief executive Aayush Agarwal told Mint that his startup plans to move into newer verticals such as home cooks, childcare and elder care over the coming months as it chases growth. The company currently services Mumbai, Thane, Noida, Gurugram, Bengaluru and Pune.

The company is not yet profitable. Agarwal said its primary costs currently include training staff, software operations for the app and salaries.

“It’s a very lean model that we operate as we have no warehousing, no inventory, no third‑party logistics, no separate last mile and no working‑capital cycles," Agarwal said. “Among consumer internet businesses, this is about as capital‑efficient as it gets."

The Bengaluru-based startup has raised $25.5 million across three rounds, with the latest $19 million led by Lightspeed. Other investors include Elevation Capital and Nexus Venture Partners.

Snabbit is a quick-service platform that connects urban households to trained, verified house help on demand—typically within about 10 minutes—for chores such as cleaning, dishwashing, laundry, bathroom and kitchen cleaning, with the option to schedule slots and bundle multiple tasks in a single hourly booking.

Agarwal said Snabbit began as a bootstrapped venture, with him putting in ₹65 lakh of personal savings in March last year. It started with a small team of around 60 house helps—“experts" in Snabbit’s terminology.

Building the business

The company's first priority was to build a reliable supply of experts by onboarding house helps from his own housing society in Mumbai and training them out of his apartment, he said.

“We didn’t spend much on marketing then and let word of mouth do the work for building supply. To acquire customers, we distributed flyers in the neighbourhood, and by April, we had completed our first 100 orders," he said.

During the Diwali weekend, Agarwal said Snabbit was completing close to 15,000 jobs a day, above last month’s usual peak of around 10,000. He added that each job has a realized price of ₹220–230.

In its beta phase, Agarwal said the service ran on WhatsApp before the team established a clear product–market fit in the high-frequency house-help category.

“Post-Diwali last year, we watched three straight weeks of non-festive growth from a base of about 120 jobs a day in our first micro-market (within a small geography in Mumbai). That’s when we knew we had product–market fit and decided to scale since the internal question was whether growth would sustain without festivals," he added.

Snabbit’s repeat rate is about 50%, meaning nearly half the new sign-ups return to complete a second task within a month, Agarwal said.

On the supply side (the gig workers), the company does not optimize for a single lever such as outsized daily or monthly incentives; instead, it balances multiple metrics to ensure stable earnings for house helps and reliable service quality.

“We’re not chasing a single lever, whether that’s acquisition, retention or supply‑side incentives for workers," Agarwal said. “Our priority is customer experience, which we measure through NPS (net promoter score), punctuality and service consistency. We track dozens of inputs across demand and supply, but we won’t optimize one at the expense of the others," he added.

As of this month, Snabbit had enrolled around 4,000 workers and 2 lakh registered users.

The company's business model works on daily accruals and monthly payouts, as in the earnings are calculated and accrued each day but disbursed in a monthly cycle to provide a predictable pay, CEO Agarwal said.

On expansion plans in adjacent verticals, Agarwal said the company will add new categories one at a time. He added that Snabbit has built a repeatable sales playbook from its house‑help business and will apply the same on‑ground techniques as it enters new categories.

“Launching a new vertical isn’t capital‑heavy since the capital is needed only after product market fit is achieved from the point of view of solving for supply build‑out, expert training and customer acquisition. We will leverage our existing customer base to drive adoption in new verticals as well," Agarwal said.

Sector scan

Besides Snabbit, funded players in home services include Urban Company, Pronto and Broomees. Pronto has raised about $2 million from Bain Capital Ventures, while Broomees has raised roughly $1.1 million from Social Alpha, 100X.VC and angel investors such as Peyush Bansal.

Urban Company had piloted personal chef services in Bengaluru in 2021 before discontinuing the offering. In March this year, it launched Insta Maids, an on‑demand, quick house‑help service similar in proposition to Snabbit.

Prior to 2019, several startups tried to build scale in home services, including Housejoy, LocalOye, Helpr and Zimmbe. But few have broken out into large companies.

“Large Indian consumer platforms scale on low AOV (average order value) and high frequency—think food delivery or quick commerce," said Rahul Taneja, partner at Lightspeed India. “Earlier, home services plays built around low‑frequency specialist tasks didn’t scale as much; Snabbit’s domestic‑help use case is inherently high frequency, with ‘quick’ as the adoption hook that later shifts to scheduled bookings."

“That’s one reason we backed the category despite prior false starts," Taneja added. “House‑help alone is about $24–30 billion in value the top 30 cities."

However, the rising gig economy has drawn criticism over worker complaints about unfair work conditions, safety lapses and incentive-led pay models that limit guaranteed earnings and push workers to chase bonuses.

The Fairwork India Ratings 2024 assessed digital labour platforms on five principles: fair pay, fair conditions, fair contracts, fair management and fair representation, and found no platform scored above 6/10. Bigbasket, Swiggy, Urban Company and Zomato topped the list at 6/10, highlighting sector-wide gaps in worker rights, especially around a local living wage and representation. BluSmart (now defunct) and Zepto scored lower, while Amazon Flex, Flipkart, Ola and Porter were rated very low or zero.