Smartstaff, a startup in the area of organized recruitment and workforce management, raised $ 4.3 million in seed funding from Blume Ventures, Nexus Venture Partners and Arkam Ventures, along with Gemba Capital and some angels.

The startup’s objective is to enable 100 million blue collar workers in India to access better work through the leveraging of technology. The funds accumulated are said to be saved for further enhancement of the product and in building teams.

Its co-founder and CEO, Arpit Dave, explains that with more and more industrial workers getting access to using smartphones is opening a huge potential to using technology to reshape the processes in workspace while unlocking massive volumes for companies and workers alike.

Dwelling into a few details about the startup, it was founded in 2020 by co-founders and ex-colleagues at Runnr namely Arpit Dave, Viral Chhajer, Gnanesh Chilukuri and Aravind Reddyit, all of whom hold the experience of already establishing and scaling startups. It is widely known to help businesses recruit as well as manage their blue collar workforce through the digitalization of workforce management.

Speaking of blue collar workers’ space, this segment is said to be conventionally managed by contractors and middle-men handling notice boards, entry registers and excel sheets. As a result, the segment has come across many inefficiencies with huge productivity losses, while the average manufacturing plant witnesses 30 percent attrition blue collar workers with more than 20 percent absenteeism at the shift level. The workforce of the startup hail with expertise across Product, Tech, Marketing & Operations.

In addition to pay and PF embezzlement by middle men among others workers also seem to suffer from incorrect wages from factories.

However, helping tackle such challenges through a mobile-based workforce management and staffing solution is Smartstaff. The startup starts by helping the manufacturing industry to level from legacy processes to drastically bring down the absenteeism and attrition rates while improving their workers’ visibility into payouts, statutory contributions and their time sheets. This has now led to the startup having over 30,00 man hours of work as well as clients such as Raymonds, Enamor, Dixcy and more being tracked on its platform each day.

While it’s at it, the startup plans on boarding more than 10,000 workers on its platform for the year end.

SmartStaff seeks to achieve game-changing efficiency in the way manufacturing and supply chain organisations source, retain, upskill, compensate, and incentivize their employees through their new-age workforce management platform. Commenting on the occasion, Mr. Sameer Brij Verma, Managing Director, Nexus Venture Partners expresses that, “we at Nexus are very delighted to join again with Runnr's founding team to re-imagine blue-collar recruitment and staffing for over 100 million employees in the country”.

"Thousands of small businesses and their employees quietly propel Indian manufacturing. Despite this, the ability to improve labour discovery, employment, productivity, and transparency is shockingly limited. The Smartstaff solution has already impressed some of the industry's smallest and largest businesses. Smartstaff will soon be at the heart of India's industrial industry ", says Blume Ventures' Karthik Reddy.

“In India, smartphone penetration has spawned waves of new age platforms affecting huge markets over the last decade. We see Smartstaff as a leader in the industry, digitizing workplace processes for manufacturers and enabling 100 million or more blue collar manufacturing workers to use their smartphones as a productivity tool with information on shifts, payouts, savings, jobs, and communication”, remarks Bala Srinivasa, managing director, Arkam Ventures.