Abhiraj Bhal (Abhiraj Singh Bhal) is the founder and CEO of UrbanClap, a home services marketplace launched in November 2014. Which is additionally Asia’s biggest home services platform.

UrbanClap or Urban Company assists clients with booking home services like beauty services, massage therapies, cleaning, plumbing, and so on

The platform is backed by Accel, Saif partners, Ratan Tata, Kunal Bahl, and Rohit Bansal. It has served more than 5 million clients and has a service network of more than 25000 trained service professionals in 24 cities from 4 nations.

Abhiraj Bhal UrbanClap CEO is a bachelors in Electrical Designing alumni from IIT-K and a MBA from the IIM-A. In the wake of finishing his post-graduate he began working with BCG, Singapore where he helped fortune 500 organizations across India Germany and South East Asia.

In the wake of getting back to India with his batch-mate from the IIT-K Varun Khaitan who had likewise worked with the BCG, America he began a film streaming start up called Cinemabox.

Post-meeting Raghav Chandra who was an alum from the University of California Berkeley, and had the experience of working with Twitter, and Yelp. Raghav Chandra around then was working on an Auto aggregator called Buggy. in

Each of the 3 met and chose to launch an endeavour in the home services space seeing that the Indian service industry is unorganized.

In 2020 UrbanClap was rebranded to Urban Company. Abhiraj Bhal the Urban Company CEO clarified that this was a stage towards their plan of global expansion. As the brand name Urban Company would go about as an umbrella brand which would carry many sub-brands and verticals. Additionally the word ‘Clap’ could convey a negative meaning in certain western countries.

This is what Abhiraj Bhal UrbanClap CEO (now Urban Company) needed to state about his Lockdown learnings according to Forbes

Abhiraj Bhal, Co-founder, and CEO of Urban Company –

Here’s a what Abhiraj Bhal discussed

During these past few months, I have had three key learnings as an individual. The first is that crisis management requires you to be both short-term and long-term in your thinking. When the lockdown was imposed in March, we had to focus on short-term prudence, control costs, and revamp our processes to prepare for a post-lockdown world. Yet, it was also important to recognise that this was a humanitarian crisis, and we shouldn’t forget the humans. Urban Company took the decision to protect jobs, not cut salaries, institutionalised various monetary and health care measures for our service partners, and took each decision with not only the short- but also the long-term picture in mind.

The second learning was to be contrarian. Contrarians sweep the market when they are right. Consequently, even as businesses were shutting down or laying off in our sector, we hired over 300 full-time employees, and on-boarded 10,000 service professionals. We were also aggressive with our marketing and communication. This helped us bounce back to 140 percent of our pre-Covid peak in a relatively short period of time.

The last learning was around time management. Prior to Covid-19, my calendar was always blocked throughout the week, but somehow work from home allowed me to be more disciplined, regimented and focussed on how and where I spend my time.

Source- https://nitesh-viswanathan.medium.com/abhiraj-bhal-urban-company-ceo-co-founder-from-resilience-to-authenticity-lockdown-learnings-4f6ff81510aa

Other articles –

Abhiraj Bhal: What You Didn’t Know About Urban Company CEO and Founder (Urbanclap)

Abhiraj Bhal Urban Company CEO & Co-founder (formerly UrbanClap) Emailed him

Abhiraj Bhal, CEO & Co-founder Urban Company/ UrbanClapin an interview with CNBC TV-18