India’s quick-commerce playbook is moving beyond groceries. The next frontier is household labour — and a new crop of startups is racing to deliver domestic help within minutes.

At the centre of this emerging category is Pronto, a startup founded by 23-year-old Anjali Sardana, which promises cleaning and household assistance in as little as 10 minutes. In less than a year, the company has scaled from a single hub in Gurugram to 10 cities and more than 18,000 daily bookings, with a workforce of thousands of trained professionals.

Investors have taken notice. Pronto recently raised $25 million in a Series B round led by Epiq Capital, taking its valuation to around $100 million, as venture capital pours into what many see as the next high-frequency consumer service category.

But Sardana is building Pronto in a market that is quickly turning competitive.

What is driving the new battle for India’s domestic help market?

India’s domestic help ecosystem has historically been informal — built on neighbourhood referrals and word of mouth. But urban lifestyles, dual-income households and time-pressed consumers are pushing demand for reliable, app-based services.

Platforms such as Snabbit, Pronto, and Urban Company’s InstaHelp are now attempting to digitise and organise this fragmented market.

The competition is heating up quickly. Urban Company’s instant vertical reportedly crossed 50,000 daily bookings within a year, while Snabbit has rapidly expanded its instant-services network across metros.

Collectively, instant house-help platforms in India already process millions of orders each month, reflecting how rapidly the category is expanding.

Yet Sardana believes Pronto can differentiate itself in a crowded field.

“We focus mainly on our own execution,” Sardana told Fortune India in an interaction. “In the long term, the company that delivers the highest quality service will win. This business is different from delivery platforms. Service professionals enter a customer’s home and spend thirty minutes to an hour or more there. Because of that, service quality becomes extremely important.”

How did the idea behind Pronto emerge?

The idea for Pronto emerged from Sardana’s observation of the everyday friction that exists in India’s domestic help ecosystem — a market that remains largely informal despite its enormous size.

During her early research, Sardana realised that both sides of the market were struggling. Urban households often faced uncertainty around the availability and reliability of domestic help, while workers themselves dealt with unstable incomes and limited protections.

“I was really drawn to the fact that this is a very inefficient market where neither consumers can easily find the house help services they need, and many workers in this segment struggle with income instability, underemployment, and lack of dignity, safety and respect,” Sardana said during the interaction with Fortune India.

She believed technology and structured operations could bring order to the chaos.

“There was clearly an opportunity to organise the market in a better way. One that works for everyone involved,” she said. “There is a real opportunity to build a win-win-win business and significantly improve life for everyone involved.”

The idea was not just to create a marketplace, but to build an organised system where domestic help could be accessed as easily and reliably as other digital services.

How is Pronto building its business differently?

Most home-services platforms historically operated as aggregators, simply connecting customers with independent service providers. Pronto is attempting something different.

Instead of a marketplace, the startup runs a managed workforce model, where it recruits, trains and schedules service professionals through a shift-based system.

The approach is designed to solve two persistent problems in the domestic help ecosystem: unreliable supply and income instability for workers.

“The shift-based system helps provide professionals with more predictable earnings and work schedules,” Sardana said during the interaction. “Our three-month retention rate for professionals is over seventy percent. That level of retention is possible because the shift system provides stability and reduces uncertainty about income.”

Professionals undergo rigorous screening and multi-day training, including background checks and skill certification before joining the platform.

Quality, Sardana says, is non-negotiable.

“Our biggest focus is quality. We have a four-day in-person training programme for service professionals and we maintain strict standards. We believe it is better not to serve a customer than to provide poor quality service,” she said. “Internally we often say that quality incidents should be treated like plane crashes rather than car accidents.”

For customers, the promise is simple: reliable household help on demand, whether for cleaning, kitchen preparation, laundry or basic chores.

How is a 23-year-old founder building an operations-heavy business?

Pronto’s rapid rise is closely tied to the ambition of its young founder.

At just 23, Sardana is building what insiders describe as an operations-heavy startup, where logistics, workforce management and density determine success more than flashy technology.

The early days were scrappy. The company started operations in Gurugram and gradually expanded to new neighbourhoods and cities.

Today, Pronto operates across 10 cities, including NCR, Bengaluru, Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad, Chennai and Kolkata.

“About fifty percent of our demand comes from NCR,” Sardana said. “Around twenty percent comes from Bangalore and Mumbai each. Pune is growing quickly, while other cities contribute smaller volumes.”

But scaling such a service is far from easy.

Why is supply the biggest challenge despite strong demand?

While consumer demand for instant home services is rising rapidly, building supply remains the biggest operational hurdle.

“In the early days, one of the biggest challenges was onboarding the first set of professionals,” Sardana said. “Building trust took time because many workers were unsure about joining a new platform and changing the way they traditionally found work.”

As the company scaled, operational complexity increased.

“When you grow fast, things inevitably break, especially on the operations side,” she said. “There were many moments where we had to put out fires and constantly adapt.”

Today, the biggest constraint is scaling supply quickly enough to match demand.

With demand growing rapidly, Pronto is investing heavily in recruiting and training service professionals.

“Our biggest priority is scaling supply,” Sardana said. “A large portion of the funds will go toward referral bonuses and supply acquisition. We are also investing heavily in technology to improve the recruitment and onboarding process.”

Are instant home services the next quick-commerce opportunity?

The instant home-services segment increasingly resembles the early days of quick commerce — a period marked by rapid funding, aggressive expansion and high cash burn.

Rivals such as Snabbit are expanding quickly, while Urban Company is investing in building a dense network of professionals to support its instant offerings.

Analysts say the real challenge will be economics.

Instant services require high workforce density and efficient logistics, making profitability difficult in the early years. Yet if the model works, the category could become one of the most frequent consumer services in urban India.

Sardana acknowledges the competition but remains focused on execution.

“It is possible that the industry will see consolidation,” she said. “But in the long run success will depend on execution. Customers care about three things most — quality, safety and reliability. The company that consistently delivers on those will ultimately succeed.”

Can Pronto turn household help into the next everyday utility?

Sardana’s ambition for Pronto goes beyond emergency housekeeping.

Her vision is to make household help a daily utility service, much like food delivery or ride-hailing. The company is already expanding into new service categories.

“We are launching new categories over the next few months,” Sardana said. “Currently we provide cleaning, kitchen prep and laundry services. We are also piloting additional services such as car washing and plan to test categories like cooks.”

The long-term opportunity, she believes, is enormous.

“I would define our total addressable market not just as instant house help services but as the entire home services category,” she said. “Our goal is to become the primary house help solution for customers rather than just an emergency backup.”

If Pronto succeeds, it could help formalise one of India’s largest informal labour markets while redefining how urban households access domestic help.

For Sardana, the mission remains simple. Build the system — one hub, one neighbourhood, one professional at a time.