SUMMARY
- Vahan secured $10M in Series B funding, led by Khosla Ventures.
- The AI recruitment tool, now multilingual, plans to support eight major Indian languages.
- The firm aims to triple placements by FY25.
In a Series B fundraising round led by current investor Khosla Ventures, Vahan has bagged $10 Million (83.7 Cr). Y Combinator, Gaingels, and Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma were among the other participants in the round. As of this round, the firm has raised $18 million in total capital, with $8 million and an undisclosed sum raised in 2021 and 2019.
With this additional funding, Vahan hopes to advance its AI hiring technology, which will eventually handle eight key Indian languages: Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Marathi, Bangla, and Gujarati. Currently, interviews are conducted in Hindi and English by Vahan’s AI recruiter.
According to reports by Inc42, founder and CEO Madhav Krishna stated that their AI recruitment tool facilitates phone-based communication with blue-collar candidates, helping to match them with suitable jobs, clarify specifications, answer queries, and assist with onboarding. The technology’s multilingual functionality, which aims to support at least eight main Indian languages and several dialects, would be one of its primary features.
In contrast to current solutions, the company’s AI recruitment technology will leverage leading-edge generative AI, encompassing large language models (LLMs) such as Gemini 1.5 and GPT-4. Also, the founder went on to say that the AI is refined using information from the recruitment firms in Vahan.ai’s network, which records over a lakh hours of phone conversations. This information aids in the AI’s training so that it can distinguish and react to various regional accents and dialects, setting it apart from other hiring technologies.
Madhav Krishna-led Vahan automates the employment of blue-collar workers through the use of artificial intelligence and WhatsApp’s API. As of now, the company concentrates on hiring for delivery services and collaborates with businesses such as Uber, Zepto, Swiggy, Flipkart, Amazon, and Rapido. To improve the retention of blue-collar workers, the creator aims to bring additional services like loans and upskilling chances. The company will also utilize the capital to expand into areas including manufacturing, logistics, and retail.
According to the company, it employs 25,000 people per month in 480 Indian towns, and by the next year, it hopes to have placed 100,000 people. It intends to treble this figure by FY25. Furthermore, the firm adds that there are currently about 10 million blue-collar workers enrolled on its platform.
