She sends help to your door in ten minutes. The real product is dignity.
A biology major who studied the rodent brain, then quit investing to build Pronto - the house-help app that went from a floor in Sector 56 to a $200 million valuation in about a year.
Open the Pronto app in Bengaluru, Delhi, or Mumbai and a person shows up at your flat in roughly ten minutes to sweep, mop, wash dishes, or fold laundry. That is the pitch a customer sees. The founder behind it, Anjali Sardana, will tell you the speed is the least interesting part.
Sardana is 24. She runs a company that handled around half a million orders last month and is now worth $200 million on paper. She owns roughly 40% of it. None of that is the headline she wants. Ask her what Pronto actually does and she reframes the question entirely: the domestic workers who show up in the green Pronto shirt are the point. In a market that treats house help as informal, interchangeable, and invisible, she is trying to give them a formal identity, a recognized brand to stand behind, and a paycheck that arrives on time.
"What's missing from a lot of the language around these services is that they treat workers like commodities," she has said. "They treat them as inputs. That's not the way we operate." It is an unusually blunt thing for a quick-commerce founder to say out loud, because the whole category sells speed, and speed usually means squeezing whoever is at the bottom of the funnel.
Pronto launched in 2025. Within months of going live it had raised an ~$11 million Series A. By March 2026 it closed a $25 million Series B led by Epiq Capital at a $100 million valuation. Six weeks later, investor Lachy Groom wrote a $20 million check and the number doubled again. The trajectory reads like a typo. It is not.
"The disruption in India is not 10-minute service. It's giving domestic workers a formal identity."- Anjali Sardana, founder & CEO of Pronto
At 17, Sardana was a student at James Madison High School in Vienna, Virginia, running experiments on synapse maturation in the juvenile rodent brain and its link to spatial navigation. The work made her a Regeneron Science Talent Search Scholar in 2020 - one of the most competitive high-school science honors in the United States.
She went to Georgetown for a biology degree, graduating in 2024, and interned with the university's own investment office. From there she moved into investing proper: a seat at Bain Capital, then venture firm 8VC. She spent that stretch watching other people's companies get built and funded.
Then she stopped watching. She moved to India and started Pronto - not to write checks, but to run the messiest, most operational business she could find: sending real people to real homes, on a ten-minute clock, in some of the densest cities on earth.
An instant home-services model launches out of Bengaluru. Early on, the Gurugram hub in Sector 56 processes about 170 bookings a day.
Including an ~$11 million Series A closed within months of launch. Bain Capital Ventures and Glade Brook Capital back the company early.
Led by Epiq Capital. Daily bookings pass 18,000; monthly orders climb past 350,000.
Investor Lachy Groom commits after a first meeting he capped at 20 minutes. Bookings hit ~26,000 a day; the worker base grows from 1,440 to 6,500.
Nine months before the $25M raise, Sardana and her team slept on the floor of the Gurugram hub to make sure the service actually showed up. Back then it was 170 bookings a day. Reliability was not a slide in a deck - it was a mattress they didn't have.
Lachy Groom agreed to give the first meeting exactly 20 minutes. That was enough. The deal closed within weeks for $20 million. "He indexes two things," Sardana said of him. "One is the founder, and that's 95% of it."
Bain Capital. 8VC. A biology degree from Georgetown. Every safe, prestigious lane was open. She chose the one that involves brooms, buckets, and 6,500 workers who need to be somewhere in ten minutes.
India's home-services market is a land grab. Analysts peg it at $15-18 billion by the end of the decade, and the race is crowded - Snabbit and Urban Company's InstaHelp each hold roughly 40% share, with Pronto around 20% and growing fast. In a fight like that, the easy move is to compete on price and speed and let the workers absorb the pressure.
Sardana's wager is the opposite. She argues that being part of a formal platform, with a recognized brand behind them, gives domestic workers agency and standing - that they become part of a core team, not disposable gig labor. If she is right, the moat isn't the ten-minute clock. It's the fact that the best workers want to wear the Pronto shirt.
It is early, and the category has drawn its share of criticism about how gig workers are treated. But the thesis is coherent, and the numbers - half a million orders a month, top customers booking 23+ times - suggest households keep coming back for something that feels different from ad-hoc help.