This Gig Startup Strives To Crack India's Employment Puzzle Bengaluru-based Awign is a tech-led on-demand work fulfilment platform

In 2016, Annanya Sarthak set out to solve the challenge of unemployment, underemployment and skill gap in India by providing meaningful livelihood opportunities, along with upskilling workers with relevant knowledge. Thus was born Bengaluru-based Awign, a tech-led on-demand work fulfilment platform.

"During my previous stint in management consulting, I became increasingly aware of the challenge of unemployment and lack of relevant opportunities in India. On the flip side, I understood the pain points such as quality of outcomes, turnaround time, cost of recruitment and training faced by most enterprises while outsourcing or offloading work. I identified the massive need for a viable solution to these challenges which benefit both employers and workers," said Sarthak, co-founder and CEO, Awign.

He then collaborated with fellow IITians Gurpreet Singh (co-founder and CRO) and Praveen Kumar Sah (co-founder and CTO) to launch their own startup. In the course of the last six years, Awign claims to have impacted over 1 million gig workforce, completing over 7 million tasks for its 100 plus enterprise partners. Currently, its services can be accessed across the country, including over 500 cities and 12,000 PIN codes.

Six years ago, however, the concept of work fulfilment through gig workers was rather unheard of, according to Sarthak. "Raising funds for an entirely new concept where VCs don't have a ready thesis of the industry was not easy and was a large challenge for the initial few years. Further, we built a first-of-its-kind no-code tech stack to create workflows for our clients and manage the entire lifecycle of thousands of gig partners daily without writing a single line of code," he says.

Moreover, since its target group comprises large enterprises, the company had to spend considerable effort in educating CXOs on the new regime of work fulfillment, along with change management. Two years ago, another tough challenge appeared on the horizon.

"When COVID hit us in 2020, 95 per cent of our topline was wiped away within 15 days and we came to near zero revenue. We had to completely revamp the business, manage our costs even better, diversify our lines of business to get back to pre-COVID levels in the next six months," explains Sarthak, adding that the company grew five times over the following year.

According to him, there is a large market opportunity for Awign to capitalise on as India's enterprises adopt gigification, and over 40 million workers shift from fixed to variable pay. India's real problem as well as the solution lies in its vast population of 1.4 billion people, Sarthak believes. With rural and urban unemployment rates at 7.7 per cent and 9.6 per cent, respectively, in August 2022, there is a large reserve of unutilised manpower which can contribute to India's GDP.

"What sets Awign apart is that in the land of various job boards and recruitment platforms, we've established ourselves as the only platform commodifying work for enterprises with the main objective of 'gigifying' core enterprise activities to variabilize PnLs for large organizations and taking care of the outcomes by solving for discovery, training, deployment, execution and payroll management," he says.

The company measures its growth thus far significantly in terms of the impact it has created for its gig partners. "In the last two years, the average earnings of our gig partners have doubled. Many active gig partners have also earned over a lakh in one month by taking up multiple gigs on the platform, being able to purchase new assets, pay off their debts and upgrade their lifestyle driven by earnings from our platform," states Sarthak.

Awign is currently building a SaaS-based workforce management tool to enable enterprises to efficiently manage different types of workers involved with the organization. The company is also looking at expanding its service lines to retail operations, merchandising, warehousing and mid-mile, market intel and consumer insights, and micro and nano influencer marketing, among others, to broaden its revenue streams.

"We have also recently expanded to global markets with an aim to tap into global organizations with mature P&Ls and solve their business challenges through the Indian talent pool," he claims.

In the next five years, Awign aims to increase its gig partner network by over 500,000 annually active gig partners to achieve over 300,000,000 tasks.