How Anjali Sardana Built the $100 Million Startup ‘Pronto’
A 23-year-old’s journey from sleeping on the office floor to leading one of India’s fastest-growing home services startups.
The Spark Behind the Idea
Every great startup begins with a problem worth solving. For Anjali Sardana, it was something deeply personal.
“My mother went back to work two weeks after I was born. I’ve seen her work my entire life, and managing a household simply added to her plate. The constant stress of dealing with unreliable help, people quitting randomly, and struggling to find replacements, weighed on her mother throughout Sardana’s childhood.”
In 2024, while researching India’s domestic labour market, Sardana noticed a sharp paradox. Customers had everything at their fingertips — food, cabs, and medical consultations — but on-demand quality household services were still out of reach. You had to approach neighbours, building guards, scroll through MyGate listings, call multiple numbers, and even then, you’d often get unreliable workers who didn’t show up, did subpar work, or haggled for extra money.
Yet her research revealed something surprising: there was no shortage of workers. Household workers were unemployed or underemployed for several months each year, facing severe income instability. She had identified a classic demand-matching problem — and she was determined to fix it.
Who Is Anjali Sardana?
At just 23, Indian entrepreneur Anjali Sardana has emerged as one of the youngest founders to build a startup valued at $100 million. She launched Pronto in April 2025, shortly after graduating from Georgetown University in the United States with a degree in biology. Before starting Pronto, she worked in investment roles at firms including Bain Capital and 8VC.
Her background in finance gave her a unique lens through which to view the problem — not just as a social inconvenience, but as a massive, underserved market ripe for disruption.
What Is Pronto?
Pronto connects households with trained professionals for 14 services like cleaning, laundry, dish washing, and meal preparation, all arriving within 10 minutes.
Customers can book through the app and are matched with a Pronto professional or ‘Pro’ they can live-track. Services are priced by time — 30 minutes, an hour, or 90 minutes — with average order values of ₹200–300, varying by city and locality. Customers can add services while a job is in progress or schedule recurring appointments for daily or weekly needs.
The platform’s promise isn’t just convenience — it’s reliability. Pronto’s business model flips gig work on its head, eschewing the commission-based model in order to provide income stability to its Pronto Professionals with guaranteed hours. This worker-first approach also drives better service, with retention rates higher than typical on-demand platforms.
As Sardana put it: “Customers care about quality, safety, and reliability. Workers care about stable employment and income.”
The Early Days: Sleeping on the Floor
The story of Pronto’s early days is as raw as it gets. Nine months ago, Sardana and her team had just one hub in Sector 56, Gurgaon, and they were sleeping on the floor to guarantee that customers who had booked received dependable service. They used to handle around 170 bookings daily.
But even from this humble beginning, the vision was clear. The operations layer automates the complex coordination between customers and professionals: matching the right person to each job, managing logistics across multiple hubs, and ensuring the timing guarantee.
The 10-minute delivery window wasn’t just a marketing promise — it was an engineering challenge. “The size of these polygons varies by location; they differ based on traffic patterns and road infrastructure,” Sardana explained, describing the geospatial system built to make ultra-fast dispatch possible.
Funding Journey: From $2M to $100M Valuation
Pronto’s fundraising story is a textbook example of momentum-driven investing.
Seed Round — May 2025: Pronto raised a $2 million seed round at a $12.5 million valuation, backed by Bain Capital Ventures.
Series A — August 2025: Just 90 days later, the startup raised an $11 million Series A round at a post-money valuation of $45 million, co-led by General Catalyst and Glade Brook Capital. That’s a 3.6x jump in valuation in under three months.
“It largely comes down to two things: one being momentum and the insane speed at which we were scaling, as well as just investors recognizing the quality of the team and how fast we were executing,” Sardana told TechCrunch.
Series B — March 2026: The company recently raised $25 million led by Epiq Capital, with existing backers Glade Brook Capital Partners, General Catalyst, and Bain Capital Ventures reaffirming their confidence by participating again — pushing the valuation to $100 million.
Explosive Growth Metrics
The numbers tell a staggering story.
- Daily bookings have grown from around 1,000 to over 18,000 in the past seven months, with week-on-week growth of more than 20%.
- The platform currently works with nearly 3,000 professionals and has a core team of about 60 employees.
- From a single hub in Gurugram, Pronto now operates in over 10 Indian cities.
- Since launching publicly in May 2025, the startup has grown 50x.
Founder Ownership & Investor Structure
Despite multiple funding rounds, Sardana has retained significant control. Ownership remains firmly in her hands, with Sardana retaining a 40% stake in the company. Among external shareholders, Glade Brook holds the largest slice at around 15%.
The Bigger Vision: Beyond B2C
Looking further ahead, Sardana sees a bigger shift: moving into B2B to organise India’s large informal labour market. “The majority of this opportunity is B2B rather than B2C,” she says, pointing to retail, construction, manufacturing, and other sectors that depend on informal workers today.
Over the next two years, Pronto plans to enter Tier I, II, and III cities across India while adding new service categories.
The startup recently shifted its headquarters to Bengaluru’s HSR Layout to tap into the city’s tech talent pool, while retaining customer support operations in Gurugram.
A Market Ripe for Disruption
Pronto isn’t alone in the space. Pronto’s competitors include Snabbit, which raised $30 million in its Series C in October 2025, and Urban Company’s Insta Help, which crossed 50,000 daily bookings in less than a year of its launch. But the scale of the informal domestic labour market in India is vast enough for multiple winners.
What Makes Pronto Different
What sets Pronto apart isn’t just the speed — it’s the philosophy. While most gig economy platforms extract value from workers through commissions, Pronto takes a different stance. “Workers and consumers are disadvantaged by disorganization in India’s domestic labor market. Workers suffer from income instability and consumers aren’t able to get the services they need. The average Pronto Professional earns 2–3x more in the first month after joining. We are building a win-win-win business,” said Sardana.
Conclusion
Anjali Sardana’s story is more than a startup success — it’s a blueprint for how a young founder with conviction, a personal connection to the problem, and sheer execution speed can reshape an entire industry. From one hub in Gurgaon and 170 daily bookings to 18,000 bookings across 10 cities and a $100 million valuation — all in under a year — Pronto stands as one of India’s most remarkable startup stories of 2025–26.
And if Sardana’s own words are anything to go by, the journey has only just begun: “We know most of the work is still ahead of us.”
📚 References
- 1The Bridge Chronicle · March 3, 2026From Floor to Fortune: 23-Year-Old’s Journey to a $100M Startup Visit Article
- 2Channel IAM · March 9, 2026Anjali Sardana Builds $100M Startup Pronto Visit Article
- 3YourStory · November 2025Pronto’s 10-Minute Model is Reshaping Domestic Help in India Visit Article
- 4TechCrunch · August 11, 2025Pronto’s 10-Minute House Help Pitch Sparked a 3.6x Valuation Jump in Just 90 Days Visit Article
- 5BusinessWire · May 15, 2025Pronto Raises $2M to Reimagine India’s Domestic Labor Market with On-Demand Services Visit Article
- 6Inc42 · March 2026Home Services Startup Pronto Raises $25 MnVisit Article
- 7OneIndia News · March 4, 2026Anjali Sardana’s Pronto Hits $100M Valuation in Under a Year Visit Article
- 8Entrepreneur India · March 2026Home Services Startup Pronto Raises USD 25 Mn in Series B Round Visit Article
