SAIF Partners, a leading venture capital firm with over $4B under management, has announced a pre-series A funding deal with
Playment. SAIF Partners has invested Rs. 4.7 Crore into the Bangalore-based venture that enables large companies to crowdsource completion of process oriented tasks that are typically done by in-house or outsourced teams (BPOs).
Playment will use the funds raised to lay the foundation of a world class engineering and product team, along with scaling up deployments in all clients.
Playment is a two sided marketplace that helps large companies bring cost-effectiveness and speed to their operations, and on the other side helps smartphone users supplement their income on the go. To the company’s credit, it has already been able to supplement monthly income of several thousand people by over a third and that explains how the company has acquired tens of thousands of 100% organic downloads.
To start with, Playment is working with Indian e-commerce companies to enable completion of micro-tasks such as meta tagging of photos, product categorization, clean up of product profiles etc. For eg: Merchants bulk upload apparel catalogues, and then a person has to do up to 15 quality inspections on each and every SKU submitted before its gets published.
Siddharth Mall, CEO, Playment said, “We strongly believe in the power of the sharing economy. The world has seen how the likes of Airbnb & Uber have created a new source of income and we want to be right up there with them.” “We’re building a platform where humans & machines can work together to solve problems which were previously unsolvable at scale. To enable this, we are using cutting edge technology, to build systems that can provide an awesome experience to thousands of our players who play on the app throughout the day. To be able to do that, we would be investing a lot in building a world class product and engineering team.”
Mayank Khanduja, Principal, SAIF Partners, said, “We’re very excited about team Playment’s discovery of what we believe to be a massive market opportunity . Moreover, we feel it’s the best team for the job as the co-founders have strong technical backgrounds and first hand knowledge of the space via their Flipkart experience. While the platform is still in early stages, it’s power lies in the ability to generate direct and recurring cash earnings for anyone with a smartphone within minutes of coming on the platform. India is a fast growing emerging market with lots of ambitious people and we believe the masses would get addicted to Playment. “
Incepted in August 2015, Playment was launched in November 2015 by IIT-Kharagpur alumni Siddharth Mall & Akshay Lal, along with IIT-Guwahati alumnus Ajinkya Malasane.
Playment – addressing the need gap:The major problems that businesses face:
· Overhead costs for in-house operations team (Hiring, Managing, Infrastructure, Administration etc) can amount upto 100% of their salaries
· Businesses have to maintain team strength that is required to support peak demand to accommodate timelines
· Traditional processes are not scalable. One can’t immediately hire more people for a sudden spike in work.
Playment solves for all these factors. Since the players are not employed by the platform, the overhead cost is zero. "We are ridiculously fast, as thousands of Players simultaneously work on the tasks 24x7. Working at scale, we can very well optimise for sudden spikes.
On the other hand, just considering India, there are millions of people ( Students, Teachers, Salesmen, Shopkeepers, Call center agents etc.) who have a lot of spare time and are always looking for alternate sources of income.
We become a natural bridge amongst the companies who want to save money and the people who want to monetise their free time," the company said in a press release.
