[Funding] Workforce Management Startup Zuper Announces Seed Funding from Prime Venture Partners and others

Zuper, a SaaS-based platform for intelligent workforce management has raised $1.1 million in seed funding. Prime Venture Partners led the round which saw the participation from Gunderson Dettmer and Gemba Capital. The company is planning to use the fresh funds to aggressively grow and expand in North America, UK & SouthEast Asia. It is also looking to hire across all functions in the US and in India.

With this investment, Prime Venture Partners has invested in nine startups in the SaaS sector including MyGate, Quizizz, and HackerEarth. The early-stage fund is led by serial entrepreneurs Shripati Acharya, Sanjay Swamy and Amit Somani. It focuses on startups that not only need capital but also require mentoring to transform them into disruptive companies. The fund has a portfolio of more than 25 companies spread across various sectors. This included Fintech, SaaS, Healthcare, Consumer, B2B etc. The firm recently announced the addition of Dr Ashish Gupta as Partner Emeritus to further strengthen its investment team.

About Zuper

Zuper is a SaaS-based, mobile-first workforce management platform that helps service businesses to modernize operations & provide on-demand Customer Experience. Raghav Gurumani, Karthik Rao and Vijay Narasiman founded Zuper in 2016 with offices in Seattle, U.S & Chennai. Later, Anand Subbaraj joined Zuper as a CEO in 2020. He has spent more than 13 years in Microsoft as a Head of Product in Azure Data.

The company has also launched COVID-19 Compliance Pack for businesses to manage operations post lockdown. It helps businesses across different industries ensure their workforce stays compliant and up-to-date with the latest COVID-19 protocols and guidelines.

The company's workforce management platform helps service organizations manage, modernize and transform the field and remote workforce. It leverages the power of AI and Machine Learning. Zuper helps organizations improve productivity and utilization of the workforce by automating repetitive tasks that impact efficiency.

It includes a white-labelled mobile and web application for modern consumer experience. Also, it has back-office application to manage, govern and operationalize the workforces. Further, the native mobile applications in iOS and Android for workforce collaboration and service 360 helps businesses to grow with data.

Talking about the startup, Anand Subbaraj, Co-founder and CEO, Zuper said:

“We want to enable service businesses to offer better customer experience and modernize the end to end service process and workflows. We formulated our hypothesis based on our own experiences with customer service and started reaching out to service businesses in different parts of the world to understand the relevance of the problem statement and saw the opportunity in hand.”

He further added, “Soon, we realized that it was a huge global problem that we need to tackle at scale using a modern technology solution. Through Zuper, we want to enable service organizations to offer the best experience to its customers and improve the productivity and the efficiency of the workforce.”

Talking about the investment, Shripati Acharya, Managing Partner, Prime Venture Partners said:

“SMBs are experiencing two powerful trends - they now manage an increasingly distributed workforce while their customers expect an on-demand service experience. Zuper’s intelligent workforce management solution provides SMBs with complete visibility to what work is being scheduled where to which partner and its current status. At the same time, their end customers are able to request, pay and track the order through a few taps on their mobile.”

The Global Home Services Market may witness a growth of 18.91% from 2019-2026. It may reach USD 1,133.40 Billion by 2026 according to Verified Market Research. In the service industry, most companies fail to provide a consistent, informed experience to its customers.

There are no effective mechanisms to track employees, their locations and work progress and there is near to zero visibility on the field-workforce. Customer behaviour and expectations are changing rapidly in the new world. Thus, companies need to recognize these changes and evolve, by personalizing the experience and giving them real-time alerts with ETA for delays and other inefficiencies.

Sripati adds, “The pandemic has further accelerated this trend and with it the demand for Zuper’s solution. We are delighted to be a part of Zuper’s mission to transform the service delivery and management for SMBs.”