Every Indian household knows the panic of “meri maid nahi aayi” – no backup plan, no fixed pricing, no way to verify who’s walking into your home. While food, cabs and groceries went digital years ago, domestic help stayed exactly where it always was. Pronto set out to fix that, one ten-minute booking at a time.

The idea belongs to Anjali Sardana, a Georgetown University graduate who topped her biology class before spending years in venture capital at Bain Capital and 8VC, evaluating startups for a living. In 2024, she stepped away from that world and moved back to India, betting that the same on-demand logic that transformed food delivery could work for something far more personal: hiring help for your home.

Pronto launched in April 2025 with one hub in Gurugram and just 170 bookings a day. Sardana reportedly slept on the office floor through the early weeks to keep things running – the kind of grind most startups don’t survive.

This one did. Daily bookings grew to over 18,000, and the company expanded from a single city to ten, including Delhi NCR, Bengaluru, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Chennai. It raised over $25 million from investors including Epiq Capital, General Catalyst, Glade Brook Capital and Bain Capital Ventures, crossing a ₹1,600 crore valuation in under a year.

The bigger shift is structural. Every worker, or “Pro,” goes through background checks and hands-on training, and works fixed shifts instead of unpredictable daily gigs – turning informal domestic work into something closer to a real job.