Gig work marketplace – VOIZ has raised seed funding of $2 million led by Omidyar Network India and other investors. Omidyar Network India makes equity investments in early-stage startups in the areas of Digital Society, Education, Emerging Tech, Financial Inclusion, Cities & Innovation, and Property Inclusivity. Omidyar Network India has previously backed startups such as White Hat Jr, Vedantu, 1MG, Bounce, Dealshare, Quikr, Scripbox, etc.
In the pre-pandemic world, gig work mostly consisted of blue-collared jobs like driving cabs, bikes and delivering food, small packages, etc. Post the pandemic, gig work has now moved to white collared jobs like tech programming, graphic designing, digital marketing, and sales. Alongside, a new category of jobs came through called the grey-collared and they consist of simple online jobs like tele-calling, customer service, data entry etc. VOIZ typically operates in the grey collared segment.
In a report published by Niti Aayog in June 2022, there were about 7 million gig workers in India in 2020 which is expected to grow to 23 million workers by 2030. A significant segment of this workforce is expected to be in the remote workspace for simple transactional work and VOIZ with its unique offerings in the grey-collar workforce market is poised to take advantage of this explosive growth.
Founded by Rajesh Bernard, Vineet Patil, and Sandeep Nyamati, VOIZ connects businesses with independent professionals for work fulfilment of simple online jobs like customer service, tele-calling, sales, and data entry, recruitment, virtual assistance, tech support, and online reputation management.
In a joint statement, the Co-Founders said, “We are excited to partner with ONI in our next phase of growth. The company will use the funds to scale up the gig workforce platform and strengthen the technology, operations and marketing functions. Our vision is to disrupt the gig workforce economy and create employment for over 3 million independent professionals in the next 5 yrs.”
Launched in July 2021, VOIZ has onboarded 100+ clients including some of the biggest Unicorns in E-commerce, Food delivery, Ed tech, Fintech and other industries. In less than 1 year of launch, VOIZ has acquired more than 1 lakh+ independent professionals for remote gig work, of which about 6000+ people are already active on the platform.