“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.” – Henry David Thoreau
After more than six years of building foundations under our dreams, we are humbled and proud in equal measure to say that Awign has grown to become India’s largest tech-led on-demand work fulfilment platform today.
In order to achieve new milestones in transformation of the gig landscape, we have raised $15 million in a Series B funding round co-led by Bertelsmann India Investments and Amicus Capital Partners, with Mynavi Corporation and existing investors – Unitus Ventures, and the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation (MSDF).
We founded Awign in 2016 with a clear mission to solve the challenge of unemployment and underemployment in India. We understood the operational gaps and roadblocks enterprises faced while outsourcing work, and realised the need for a tech-led solution that benefits both enterprises and India’s large pool of unemployed workers. We wanted to bring the ‘gig economy’ into the formal business ecosystem because of the potential it offered – from enabling enterprises to scale rapidly, become cost-effecient, stay agile and offer work opportunities to a young, eager-to-learn workforce.
This is why we persevered to fulfil our vision and built a platform that differentiates itself from traditional discovery or staffing to manage the entire lifecycle of our gig partners. For our enterprise clients, we configure, optimize and execute core business functions at scale through a distributed gig workforce across 12,000 pincodes.
Being a purpose-led business, it gives us great pleasure to just look at the community of people we have impacted in the course of these years. Through our platform, gig partners have been able to gain employment opportunities, take care of their families, buy new assets, and even earn money from the comfort of their homes. So many of our women gig partners have been able to rejoin the workforce even while sitting in Tier 3 or Tier 4 cities in India. The success stories of our gig partners we see every day brings joy and satisfaction to our lives. For us, we believe that the more we empower our gig partners, the more they empower us to scale our business.
It’s exhilarating to be able to deliver on what was once just an idea – but this is a product of the effort, time and value of each and every employee, former and present who made it their personal mission to keep pace with our dreams, even if we moved at breakneck speed at times.
We are also grateful to Unitus Ventures, and the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation (MSDF) for helping us set the foundation and guiding us to this stage. It is their trust in our capabilities and confidence in our business model that gave us the filip to expand our own potential.
We plan to utilize the fresh funds in enhancing our technological capabilities, expanding digital services into global markets, and bolstering supply and demand acquisitions. While we will continue to penetrate further into our domestic market, we will also leverage India’s large pool of gig workers to solve problems for organizations across the globe.
With India’s gig workforce estimated to reach 2.3 crores by 2029-2030, we anticipate that ‘gigigification’ will become the most common and efficient way to get work done. Enterprises might not even consider spending valuable time, money and resources on setting up teams and managing their workloads. Tech-enabled offloading to a market leader like ourselves will help all enterprises reduce TAT, ramp up and down on-demand, become cost-efficient and scale their businesses sustainably.
We remain committed to the same vision we had when we started – to empower unemployed workers to gain job opportunities and leverage their skills to solve problems for enterprises. With continuing support from you all, we expect to become the world’s go-to platform for on-demand work fulfilment.
Of course, we still have a long way to go. But we are certain where we want to be. 🙂
