(Bloomberg) — Vahan.ai, an AI-powered recruiter of blue-collar workers, has secured $10 million in funding led by Silicon Valley billionaire Vinod Khosla’s Khosla Ventures, bringing artificial intelligence to a hiring segment in India long dominated by mom-and-pop operators.
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The Series B round also drew capital from other US investors such as Y Combinator Inc. and Gaingels LLC to tackle a segment that Vahan expects will account for 70% of India’s new job growth by 2030. The new funds will be deployed to hone the technology and expand the languages covered, the startup said in an announcement Thursday, casting a wider net to capture the hundreds of millions of potential hires in India’s smaller, more remote towns.
The Bangalore-headquartered firm helps a variety of internet service operators, from the likes of Uber Technologies Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. to food delivery giants Swiggy and Zomato. It also provides gig workers for local quick-commerce players Zepto and Blinkit.
“We help recruit 25,000 workers every month,” said Madhav Krishna, Vahan founder and chief executive officer. “Our AI recruiter speaks Hindi and English, telling candidates about the opportunity and collecting their details.”
The ability to communicate by voice makes the onboarding process easier and helps bridge any gaps in tech literacy. Vahan has placed over 500,000 workers, recruited from nearly 500 cities, since its start in 2016. Only AI tools could possibly achieve the speed required to meet the exploding demand for workers, Krishna said in an interview, presenting his app with a Hindi voice demo.
Vahan is also running trials for AI-led hiring for giant electronics makers, a segment that’s booming as factories shift from China to India.
The startup uses generative AI systems from leading AI companies like OpenAI. With the help of ElevenLabs, which specializes in natural-sounding speech synthesis, Vahan generates voices that sound natively Indian, Krishna said. Vahan’s innovations ensure quick response times, which are critical for AI-powered voice conversations. “The cost of running our tech is 3 cents per connected minute, half the cost of a human caller,” the CEO said.
India’s gig workers will constitute more than 4% of the country’s labor force by 2030, according to a June report by India’s tech industry trade group, Nasscom. The segment as a whole will deliver services of over $250 billion in value by 2032, Vahan said in its announcement.
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