LocalOye raises $5M from Lightspeed Venture and Tiger Global Management

LocalOye, a marketplace for hiring local service professionals has raised $5 million Series A funding from Tiger Global Management and Lightspeed Venture Partners. LocalOye will use the funds to aggressively scale nationwide and expand to more service categories.

LocalOye currently operates in Mumbai, offering services in a 250 plus categories; including education (e.g. tutors), home services (e.g. appliance repairs), wellness (e.g. yoga, fitness) and events (e.g. photographers) etc.

“The platform uses an advanced recommendation engine to connect customers with high-quality service professionals within a few minutes. Customers can give their requirement to the LocalOye app via easy steps; and on the other side the service professionals also use an app to review, accept, engage and schedule bookings with those customers,” said the company’s official release.

LocalOye was founded by Aditya Rao, a graduate from BITS Pilani, in 2013.Commenting on the fund-raise, he said, “People spend money on two things – buying products or services. We want to completely own the services space.Over the past 1.5 years, we have solved some of the toughest local services problems, and now it is time to exponentially build on this momentum by continuing our focus on great execution, merchant quality and customer delight.”

Dev Khare, Managing Director, Lightspeed India, said, “LocalOye brings a disruptive experience to the classifieds and yellow pages market that has not seen innovation in a decade. We saw clarity of vision and execution in the LocalOye team that we have not seen elsewhere.”

Lee Fixel,Partner, Tiger Global Management, said, “LocalOye’s vision to bridge the online-to-offline services market in India is highly compelling for both consumers and businesses. We are very excited to support LocalOye in their expansion.”

In 2014, LocalOye had raised its initial seed round of funding from some of the top angel investors including Sidharth Rao (Co-founder Webchutney), Haresh Chawla (ex-Group CEO Network 18 and India Value Fund partner), and Sachin Bhatia (co-founder, MakeMyTrip).

In the next few months, LocalOye would be investing heavily in technology and building the team. Aditya Rao added, “We do not want to build another classifieds company. The LocalOye platform is highly interactive and data driven; and this is what makes our engine smarter every day. And we have also seen a huge demand from service professionals for better tools to manage their business.”

For service professionals, LocalOye uses its in house products and team to personally verify (aadhar card), background check (certifications, court records etc) and screen (quality, expertiseetc) every member before they are on boarded the platform.