Having raised $170 million in the pandemic frenzy, the job board startup has struggled to get anyone to pay, and now wants to enter Naukri’s turf.
Nirmit Vidyut Parikh is confident his startup will be worth more than $10 billion, a decacorn. That seems unlikely.
Parikh founded Apna in 2019 as a LinkedIn for blue- and grey-collar workers. When the pandemic hit the very next year, the company’s user base grew massively and Apna rode that high to raise $170 million across two funding rounds in 2021. The second of those, a $100 million fundraise led by Tiger Global, valued the startup at $1.1 billion, making it the fastest in India to become a unicorn.
For the first couple of years, it ran almost entirely as …
Samiksha covered all things startups at The Morning Context. She joined us from The New Indian Express, where she wrote stories on the retail and food sectors. Prior to that, she had covered startups and written various business features in the Deccan Herald.
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samiksha@mailtmc.com
Bengaluru