Zuper, provider of a leading intelligent workforce and customer management platform, today announced it has raised $1.1 million in seed funding, led by Prime Venture Partners and participation from Gunderson Dettemer and Gemba Capital. The company also announced the appointment of former Microsoft product leader Anand Subbaraj as Chief Executive Officer.

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Since its founding in 2016, Zuper’s workforce management SaaS platform has empowered more than 500 service businesses and thousands of users globally in the residential and commercial cleaning, HVAC, electrical, Internet Service Provider, plumbing, and landscaping industries to modernize their operations and provide an on-demand booking experience for customers. To date, Zuper has facilitated more than 2 million work orders worldwide across the U.S., EMEA and APAC.

The global Home Services Market is expected to grow 19% from 2019-2026 and reach USD $1.13 trillion by 2026 according to Verified Market Research. Today, many service companies fail to provide a consistent and informed experience to customers across all communication channels. They lack effective solutions to track employees, their locations and work progress and there is near zero visibility on the field-workforce. Customer behavior and expectations are changing rapidly, and companies need to evolve with on-demand service models that personalize the experience and provide customers with real-time alerts for ETA and possible service delays.

“Zuper was founded to enable service businesses to embrace our digital future, provide their customers with a frictionless, on-demand experience, and improve the productivity and efficiency of their workforce,” said Anand Subbaraj, CEO of Zuper. “The founding team formulated its hypothesis based on personal customer service experiences and started reaching out to companies in different parts of the world to understand common pain points and validate market demand. It quickly became apparent that there was a huge unmet need for a comprehensive workforce management platform focused on providing customers with the best possible experience from booking appointments to interacting with company employees. At Zuper, we are tackling this problem at scale and see a significant runway for growth, especially in our current COVID-economy.”

With the new capital, Zuper will continue to invest in platform innovations, as well as sales and marketing to fuel aggressive growth and expansion in North America and other key geographies. It will also invest in talent to support this growth and is hiring across all functions in the U.S. and India.

“SMBs are experiencing two powerful trends – they now manage an increasingly distributed workforce while their customers expect an on-demand service experience,” said Shripati Acharya, Managing Partner, Prime Venture Partners. “Zuper’s mobile-first, intelligent workforce management solution provides SMBs with complete visibility to what work is being scheduled, as well as the location, employee and status for every job. At the same time, their end customers are able to request, pay and track the order through a few taps on their mobile. The pandemic has further accelerated this trend and with it the demand for Zuper’s solution. We are delighted to be a part of Zuper’s mission to transform the service delivery and management for SMBs.”

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Zuper’s intelligent workforce management platform helps service organizations manage, modernize and transform the field and remote workforce. By leveraging the power of AI and Machine Learning, Zuper helps organizations improve productivity and utilization of the workforce by automating repetitive tasks that impact efficiency. The Zuper Platform includes a white-labeled mobile and web application for a modern consumer experience, back-office application to manage, govern and operationalize the workforces, native mobile applications in iOS and Android for workforce collaboration and service 360 to grow business with data.

The end-to-end platform offers features such as:

  • Smart scheduling and dispatching
  • Work order management
  • COVID-19 Compliance
  • Intelligent location services
  • Quotations and invoicing
  • Inventory and contract management.

Zuper was founded in August 2016 with offices in Seattle, U.S & Chennai by Raghav Gurumani, Karthik Rao and Vijay Narasiman. Anand Subbaraj, joined Zuper as CEO in 2020 having spent more than 13 years in Microsoft as a Head of Product in Azure Data. The enterprises and midsized businesses using Zuper across thousands of employees have benefited from significant operational advantages including a 50% increase in workforce utilization, 35% reduction in service turnaround time, 45% increase in customer adoption and profitability, and 30% reduction in costs.

The company has also launched COVID-19 Compliance Pack for businesses to manage operations post lockdown. The solution helps businesses across different industries ensure their workforce stays compliant and up-to-date with the latest COVID-19 protocols and guidelines.

With this investment, Prime Venture Partners has invested in nine startups in the SaaS sector including MyGate, Quizizz, and HackerEarth. The early stage fund, led by serial entrepreneurs Amit Somani, Shripati Acharya, Sanjay Swamy and Amit Somani focuses on startups that not only need capital but also require mentoring to transform them into disruptive companies. The fund has a portfolio of more than 25 companies spread across sectors such as Fintech, SaaS, Healthcare, Consumer, B2B etc. The fund recently announced the addition of Dr. Ashish Gupta as Partner Emeritus to further strengthen its investment team.

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