Apna finds there’s no money in a blue-collar LinkedIn

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Editor's note: 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 a free app for job-seekers and recruiters alike. While many questioned whether a job board for blue-collar hiring would really generate much revenue, Parikh brushed off the concerns.  “We have been running experiments and we know we can make money. It’s a tap I can start at any point,” he said in a mid-2021 interview with TechCircle.  The picture at Apna, however, is very different from what he had imagined. It started charging recruiters in March last year and, after …