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Pronto Daily Booking Growth
Growth of daily orders from last year to the present
Primary Sources
Pronto, Urban Company, Snabbit: India's home-help conundrum | The Week
India has an “entrenched culture of outsourcing household work”, said Reuters, with domestic help traditionally organised through word of mouth and paid in cash. But new apps are changing the practice and turning the system digital.Although the start-ups offer attractive fees for clients alongside competitive earnings for workers, concerns around safety will be harder to pay off.Attractive numbersThe numbers are currently attractive for both clients and workers: companies are “betting big” and “burning millions of dollars” to “lure busy professionals” with charges of less than 99 rupees (79p) an hour that “have no global parallel”, said Reuters. For instance, similar services can cost around £22 an hour in the US, and around £5 in China.Article continues below The Week Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives. SUBSCRIBE & SAVE Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox. From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox. In a country with a per capita income of around £2,200, workers on these apps can see annual earnings reach £3,700 by working eight hours a day. “My income has roughly doubled,” a 32-year-old from West Bengal, who worked through Snabbit, told the Indian Express.Greater risksSo far, so good. But the “craze” is “tempered by concerns” about women’s safety in a country with “high rates of sexual harassment”. Unlike delivery drivers who spend “just brief moments at doorsteps”, the workers may spend hours inside private homes, “exposing them to greater risks”, said Reuters.Pronto and Snabbit have an SOS button within the app that alerts area supervisors in case of emergency. Pronto also offers self-defence training for workers. Urban Company says it offers a women-only safety helpline and an SOS app feature.But a women’s rights activist noted that while the companies run extensive background checks on workers before hiring them, they don’t vet the credentials of customers, who can simply log in on apps to book home help.A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.comIn between bookings, the workers “have only the cold, dusty sidewalk to sit on” and for some, the uniforms they wear are “visible identifiers that they’d rather not have”, said The ...
Lachy Groom: From Stripe to Billion-Dollar Investments
You ever get caught up in a scandal and suddenly everyone forgets what you actually built? That's basically what happened to Lachy Groom when his San Francisco mansion got hit by an armed robber who made off with $11 million in crypto. The headlines immediately pivoted to "Sam Altman's ex-boyfriend" and suddenly nobody wanted to talk about his actual resume anymore. But here's the thing—if you actually dig into what this guy has accomplished, the robbery becomes almost a footnote in what's honestly a pretty insane career arc. Lachy Groom is 31. Australian. And by most Silicon Valley standards, he's already lived like five different successful lives. Let me back up. Kid grows up in Perth, teaches himself to code at 10, founds and sells three companies before he's 17. Not side projects—actual businesses. By the time he's old enough to think about college, he's already figured out that traditional education isn't the move. So what does he do? Packs up, moves to San Francisco, and gets hired as Stripe's 30th employee. Stripe wasn't even the household name it is now. But Groom spent seven years there (2012-2018), watching it transform into a Silicon Valley titan. He wasn't just watching though—he was building. Led their card issuing business, managed global expansion into Singapore, Hong Kong, New Zealand. This wasn't just a job. It was basically a paid MBA in how to scale a B2B SaaS company from zero to a hundred-billion-dollar business. When he left in 2018, he had three things: financial freedom, deep operational knowledge, and a ticket into what people call the "Stripe Mafia"—basically the network that now runs half of VC in Silicon Valley. Then he became a solo investor. And this is where it gets interesting. Most angel investors throw money at 100 companies hoping a few stick. Groom's different. He's a sniper. When he sees something, he writes checks for $100K to $500K and moves fast. His thesis is pretty straightforward: invest in tools people want to use, not software they're forced to use. The results speak for themselves. According to PitchBook, he's made 204 investments across 122 companies. Some of his bets: Figma—invested in the seed round in 2018 at a $94 million valuation. When it IPO'd last year (July 2025), market cap hit $67.6 billion on day one. That's roughly a 185x return. Not bad. Notion—lead investor in 2019 when it was at $800 million. Two years later, $10 billion valuation. Last I checked, they're doing over $500 million in annualized r...
Latest Startup News From The Indian Startup Ecosystem - Inc42 Media
The latest startup news from the Indian Startup Ecosystem including new startup fundings, acquisitions, government policies, investments funds, and more.
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