From groceries and cabs to courier services, nearly every part of urban life has moved online. But one essential need still remains offline: finding reliable domestic help. For many Indian households and young professionals, domestic help is essential for cooking, cleaning, and daily chores. However, the process remains fragmented, marked by delays, inconsistency, and lack of trust.
Ayush Agarwal, Founder of , felt this gap personally as a working professional living away from home in Powai, Mumbai. “I didn’t know how to find someone to clean my house. I tried looking online, speaking to agencies, and asking friends, but the process was unclear and inaccessible,” he recalls.
Trying to solve this gap, Agarwal asked his building watchmen for leads and soon realised there was no shortage of domestic help workers looking for jobs. “In my own society of about 500 flats, I spoke to around 200 domestic help workers who were unemployed,” Agarwal says. In gated communities, workers couldn’t reach residents, and vice versa.
The issue wasn’t demand or supply, but access.
Bridging access
The problem stayed with him even in his role as chief of staff at Zepto, a company built on speed and convenience. That’s when Agarwal decided to build Snabbit, a tech-led platform that connects households to trained and verified home service experts for quick services through its app.
Snabbit claims its home service experts can arrive within 10 minutes, and their services are charged by the hour (between Rs 169 and Rs 199), with multiple tasks handled in one booking. It’s as seamless as booking a cab or ordering groceries.
The startup’s presence in micro and macro markets enables it to deliver on its 10-minute promise, even in clustered cities like Mumbai and Bengaluru. “We geo-fence areas into small clusters, usually less than a kilometre wide. Then we predict demand in real time and position our experts close to the hotspots,” Agarwal says.
Snabbit’s system works much like how Uber drivers position themselves, but with greater precision. “Today, the median time from booking to expert arrival is 10 minutes and 36 seconds, and it continues to reduce as density increases,” Agarwal tells YourStory.
On-demand home services
The startup manages the entire model, from sourcing to training and deploying its experts to ensure consistency and quality. Its home-service experts undergo screening, police and ID verification, and training at dedicated centres in Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Gurugram before being onboarded.
Early on, the startup built structures such as payouts, incentives, and quality metrics, which have helped its workforce grow to several thousand home service professionals.
Today, the brand has served over one lakh customers and continues to handle unusual yet interesting requests, from unpacking suitcases and peeling pomegranates to taking clothes out of washing machines.
“Customers were outsourcing the chores they disliked most,” Agarwal notes. However, Snabbit’s training includes clear guardrails to ensure its experts do not take on tasks that could compromise their safety. The home service platform has built-in protection measures like SOS buttons and active field support teams.
The B2C startup aims to create a seamless experience for its users while improving the livelihoods of its home service experts by providing Aadhaar-linked bank accounts, health and life insurance, and steady monthly incomes. Depending on the hours they choose to work, experts can earn anywhere from Rs 10,000 to Rs 35,000 per month.
Snabbit works with home service experts on full-time contracts through a unique “captive supply with flexibility” model, positioning them outside the traditional categories of gig workers or employees.
“The idea is to democratise access. Everyone wins: the experts earn more, customers get convenience and on-demand availability, and the platform solves one of the deepest household pain points,” Agarwal emphasises.
Challenges of bringing domestic help online
In the early stages, many acknowledged the market’s size but believed the offline way of doing things would never change, that domestic help could never be digitised. Yet, Agarwal bet on a transformation by getting the timing and execution right.
“Just as quick commerce worked where supermarkets hadn’t,” he points out.
Agarwal explains, “Urban households spend across five major categories: ecommerce, mobility, food, grocery, and home services. While the first four have been digitised, home services remain largely offline despite accounting for double the household spend of food or mobility, and with barely 1% digital penetration.”
To him, the opportunity was obvious, and the journey became about finding the right product–market fit by testing subscriptions, on-demand, and 10-minute fulfilment.
Initially, convincing domestic help workers to come on board was difficult, as many questioned the model and hesitated to change how they had worked for years. But with hands-on training and support, those who joined found it just as profitable, with fixed hours and better perks.
“As an early player in home services, we didn’t have any existing playbooks to follow,” says Agarwal.
“In categories like domestic help, ownership is inconsistent, and one bad experience could lose a customer forever. The only way to guarantee quality at scale was full-stack control,” he adds. He trained the first batch of experts himself, building training modules from scratch.
The brand deliberately stayed within single micro-markets, perfecting its home service systems before expanding. “That rigour allowed us to grow into multiple micro-markets in Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Gurugram without burning capital randomly.”
In May 2025, the service-based company secured $19 million in a Series B funding round led by venture capital firm Lightspeed. Existing investors Elevation Capital and Nexus Venture Partners also participated in the round. During the funding, the company said it plans to expand its market into more metropolitan areas, entering more than 200 micro-markets and offering a wider range of on-demand home services.
Urban Company’s Instahelp, Pronto, and Broomees are other players in the fast-growing home services market. But Snabbit is positioning itself as a high-frequency home services platform, aiming to build what it describes as India’s first comprehensive operating system for rapid home services, driven by technology, reliability, and a network of trained professionals.
