The government on Jan 20,2021 nominated 28 non-official members on the National Startup Advisory Council, including Abhiraj Bhal Urban Company CEO, Byju’s CEO Byju Raveendran, Ola Cabs co-founder Bhavish Aggarwal, Kalaari Capital MD Vani Kola and etc.
The term of the non-official members of this council, chaired by Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal, shall be for two years or until further orders, whichever is earlier.
The Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) had constituted the council on January 21, 2020, to advise the government on measures required to build a “strong ecosystem for nurturing innovation and startups in the country,” stated the Commerce Ministry in a release.
The term of the non-official members of this council, chaired by Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal, shall be for two years or until further orders, whichever is earlier. Other members include ZestMoney CEO Lizzie Chapman, Urban Company co-founder Abhiraj Bhal, Kris Gopalakrishnan of Axilor Ventures, Renuka Ramnath from the Indian Private Equity and Venture Capital Association, Uday Kotak of the CII and Uday Shankar of Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI).
About 183 employees at Urban Company, across designations & roles, were eligible to participate in the latest Esop transaction at Urban Company, of which about 120 people, ranging from call centre executives to senior leadership, at Urban Company participated.
Existing investor in Urban Company (formerly UrbanClap) Vy Capital has picked up employee stock options (Esops) worth about $5 million in Urban Company through a secondary transaction.
The UAE-based fund VY capital, which also counts online food delivery major Zomato, NoBroker and MagicPin among its portfolio, has been an investor in Urban Company since 2017.
Abhiraj Bhal, Urban Company CEO, Raghav Chandra & Varun Khaitan, Co-founders (from left to right)
It holds 10.3% share in Urban Company, according to data collated by Tracxn.
According to the CEO of Urban Company Abhiraj Bhal, about 183 employees, from different designations were eligible to participate in this ESOP transaction event, of which about 120 Urban Company employees, ranging from call centre executives to senior leadership, participated.
In 2017, UrbanClap, as it was known earlier, had undertaken a $1 million Esop sale round, which was followed by a $2.5 million secondary round in December of 2018.
That coincided with the Urban company’s primary fundraising round, in which it had raised $50 million led by London-based firm Steadview Capital.
The latest Esop sale was around — Rs 1,10,000 per share — at which the Series E secondary transaction held last July, according to Abhiraj Bhal, Urban Company CEO.
This also comes at an opportune time for startup employees, who have been hit hard by a combination of layoffs, and payouts as India’s consumer internet companies struggle to recover from the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and a lockdown.
“I think in a very interesting way, allowing team members to take some money off the table does two things – it makes the instrument very real, so that there is no longer this view that this is paper money. It is real cash, and they start thinking its better than cash, because they won’t earn similar returns even if they put it in any market instrument, given the value appreciation every 18 months or so” Abhiraj Bhal, Urban Company CEO.
Under Urban Company’s Esop programme, every employee gets Esops at a face value of 1rs and the Urban Company’s prevailing stock price has crossed Rs 1 lakh.
“Secondly, we also have accelerated vesting; if Urban Company goes public, or if there is a strategic sale, it doesn’t matter what has been vested with you till date, the rest of the shareholding that is unvested vests in an accelerated fashion, which is very, very friendly for employees,” Abhiraj Bhal, CEO of Urban Company said.
Third, there’s the concept of a no-hold period.
“We have kept an infinite hold period. Urban Company won’t force our employees to exercise any time really. It’s up to them. We have a vesting schedule of 25% each year over four years,” CEO of Urban Company added.
Founded by Abhiraj Bhal, Urban Company CEO Varun Khaitan and Raghav Chandra (Co-founder), Urban Company offers spa, beauty, grooming, repairs and cleaning services via its apps. Urban Company bridges the gap between trained service professionals and consumers seeking services from professional service providers. The platform earns its revenue through a commission fee model based on transactions made on its website and mobile application.
Urban Company’s July revenue was at 77% pre-Covid-19 peak in February, and it expects to fully recover in the next 1-2 months.
Urban Company said it was seeing faster recovery of in-home services like repair, painting, and pest controls, home cleaning – reaching almost 90% of pre-Covid-19 levels in July.
In August of last year, Urban company had raised $75 million in a Series E round led by Tiger Global Management, valuing it at close to $1 billion.
Read more interesting news about Urban Company here:
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.
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