Is
it possible to become a unicorn in just 21 months? The success story of Apna — a professional networking platform — says
that nothing is impossible. The company was able to become a unicorn without
big figures in its annual turnover. Apna started
its unicorn journey after the country’s economy began to regain balance from
the losses incurred during the Covid lockdown. The Bengaluru-based firm became
a unicorn after it raised $100 million in Series C funding led by Tiger Global.
The startup
that was started in 2019 by Nirmit Parikh now has offices in Mumbai, Delhi,
Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Pune, among others. This platform boasts of having 50
lakhs jobs, 16 million users and 150,000 SMB’s. It also helps the companies
conduct 18 million job interviews every month.
Parikh,
who is an engineer, has an MBA from Stanford University. He was not able to
taste success with the companies he started at the early stages of his career.
After pursuing MBA, Parikh worked with Apple. He later understood that
unemployment is a global phenomenon and not limited to India. This revelation
made him think about starting a new company. Parikh knows the perspective of an
employer. In order to understand the different aspects of blue-grey collar
jobs, he worked as an electrician, foreman and shop floorman.
“Unless
you experience a problem, you will not able to give a good solution to
that.” This is Parikh’s motto. The popular song ‘Apna Time
Aayega…’ from the Bollywood movie Gullyboy inspired
Parikh to name his company Apna. During the development stage of the app, Parikh
spent his time in the slums of Mumbai to understand the needs of customers.
Apna now
aims to reach 2.3 billion people belonging to the working class globally.
