Pronto, a Mumbai-based startup founded by 23-year-old Anjali Sardana, is rewriting the rules of domestic help in India , promising a cleaner at your door in 10 minutes flat, for less than the price of a chai.
Before any of Pronto's workers set foot inside a stranger's home, they pass through a training hub that looks nothing like the informal word-of-mouth networks that have long defined domestic employment in India. Women practice chopping techniques on real produce. They mop floors to a standard. And they learn how to trigger an SOS signal from their phones , a distress alert that can be sent silently if something feels wrong inside a customer's home. It is this combination of the mundane and the urgent that tells you everything about what Pronto is actually building: not just a faster booking app, but a formalized infrastructure for a workforce that has historically had almost none.
The startup closed a $25 million funding round in March 2026, led by Epiq Capital, pushing its valuation past the $100 million mark , an 8x jump in under a year. Monthly bookings have crossed 500,000, with daily orders peaking at 22,000 across Mumbai and Pune. For investors, the numbers tell a clean story of demand. For Sardana, now 23, they represent a proof of concept that on-demand domestic help can be organized at scale without relying entirely on the informal trust structures India has used for decades.
The 10-to-15-minute delivery promise is Pronto's headline act, and it comes with a base fee of roughly $1 , about ₹85. That price point is deliberately consumer-facing, designed to make the service feel as frictionless as ordering lunch. But the operational challenge behind that promise is considerable. Getting a trained worker to a specific flat in a Mumbai high-rise within 15 minutes requires dense geographic clustering of available workers, which in turn requires those workers to be nearby, ready, and equipped. The training hubs serve that function too: they act as staging areas as much as classrooms.
The SOS feature sits at the heart of Pronto's pitch to workers, not just consumers. Domestic work in India has long carried physical risk for the people doing it, with limited recourse when situations turn unsafe. A digital distress signal does not eliminate that risk, but it shifts the dynamic in a meaningful way , creating a documented record and an immediate response pathway that informal employment simply cannot offer. Whether that layer of protection is sufficient will be tested as Pronto scales into new cities and less familiar neighborhoods.
A market burning fast
Pronto is not operating in a vacuum. Snabbit recently raised $19 million and is reportedly seeking $60 to $70 million more. Urban Company's InstaHelp vertical crossed one million monthly bookings in March 2026, though at considerable cost , the unit reportedly burned ₹61 crore in Q3 while generating ₹6.8 crore in revenue. That gap between spend and income is a sector-wide pattern, and it raises a straightforward question: who absorbs the shortfall while the market matures?
The answer, critics argue, is often the workers. A $1 base fee leaves thin margins for the people doing the actual labor, and the pressure to complete jobs quickly enough to sustain a 10-minute promise can translate into rushed work and physical exhaustion. Pronto's formalization argument , that gig platforms offer more predictability and safety than informal employment , is real, but it coexists uneasily with a pricing structure that keeps consumer costs at street-chai levels.
What Sardana has built is genuinely novel for India's domestic services market. The training infrastructure, the safety tooling, the logistics density required to hit those delivery windows , these are not small operational achievements. The harder question is whether the business model can sustain wages that make the work worth doing over time, or whether the
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