Exclusive: Temasek’s LemmaTree to invest in hiring platform Vahan.ai

LemmaTree, a Temasek-founded investing firm, has invested an undisclosed amount in Vahan.ai, a leading AI-powered recruitment platform for blue-collar workers.

The Bengaluru-based HR tech company, which initially provided skilling services, entered the job space in 2019. As a Y Combinator alum, Vahan.ai raised a total of $18 million in Series A and Series B rounds that were led by Khosla Ventures in 2024. Its latest funding round was in February 2025—Series B with Persol Group for an undisclosed amount. Other names which have provided capital support are Airtel, Gaingels, and angel investors like Vijay Shekhar Sharma, the founder of Paytm. The company clocked an annual revenue of ₹26.9 crore ($3.25M) for FY24, as per the latest Traxcn data. 

Speaking exclusively to Fortune India, Madhav Krishna, CEO and founder of the company, said that this investment would be used to improve its technology stack, primarily to get its AI bot to provide multilingual capabilities with the addition of eight Indian languages. It will also enable the AI recruiter to perform basic documentation checks to help reach its target of placing 1 lakh workers in a month. “The AI recruiter can triple productivity. If a human recruiter were hiring one person a day, they're able to do three a day if they use AI; that three will perhaps become more, as the AI becomes better”, he says.

Amidst a funding cooldown by venture capital and private equity, Krishna says that investors know about the opportunity that the blue-collar market presents, which Vahan.ai is catering to. “It's one of those infinite markets,” he says. “And then when you combine that with what's happening in the quick commerce space, where you today have largely a three-horse race, but now you have Flipkart and Amazon also doubling down. All of those tailwinds are in our favour,” he adds. 

The strategic partnership is twofold, with an investment from Temasek-founded LemmaTree, which has a strong presence in Southeast Asia and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), and the acquisition of L.earn, a digital learning and upskilling tech platform of GoodWorker, backed by LemmaTree. 

As per their statement, Vahan.ai has placed over 1 million workers across 920+ cities and currently facilitates approximately 40,000 job placements per month, working with employers such as Zepto, Swiggy, Blinkit, and Zomato. With this investment from LemmaTree, Vahan.ai will focus on sales and growth team expansion as well. The company is also looking to diversify into manufacturing, warehousing and driver recruitment, as a way to expand its reach across all industries. It also plans to penetrate tier-2 and tier-3 cities, while leveraging LemmaTree’s presence in Southeast Asia and MENA for further international expansion. 

According to Krishna, as the foundational models and the intelligence layer are getting commoditised, which potentially reduces the cost of AI; therefore, it boils down to the real value generated by applications that use AI. “We're building it in a very unique space for a very unique use case by helping small recruiters who work in small agencies in India become more productive. So we're going after this very large opportunity also in a very interesting and different way, which helps us differentiate, beat the competition, and capture more market.”

Alongside this transaction, the integration of L.earn will embed modular skilling journeys directly into the job-seeking process. L.earn is mobile-first, no-cost, vernacular content tailored for gig and frontline workers in sectors like logistics, manufacturing, and retail. The skilling service provider was initially launched by Sonu Sood, which was taken over by GoodWorker and developed further.

Speaking on the outlook of the blue-collar/gig economy, which, according to several reports, is set to drive 70% of the country’s new employment growth by 2030, Krishna expects the quick commerce segment to grow by double for the next two years. “Beyond that, you'll probably see growth tapering, but it will still be strong.” With ambitious goals to provide opportunities to a billion people, Krishna bets on such investments that would help in scaling and growth.