₹50 lakh to book freelancers in seconds

Finding a freelance video editor in India still takes 3-5 days of DMs, portfolio reviews, and back-and-forth pricing. Unjob, a Bengaluru-based startup founded by Dev Taneja, wants to cut that to the time it takes to place a Blinkit order. The company just raised ₹50 lakh in pre-seed funding from Ruchi Rathor, CEO at Payomatix Technologies — and the bet is straightforward: apply quick commerce logic to digital services.

What Unjob Actually Does

Unjob describes itself as "quick commerce for services" — and that phrase is doing real work, not just marketing. The platform lets a brand or creator browse curated freelancers, pick a service (video editing, graphic design, AI-generated content, UI/UX), and check out in seconds. A freelancer is assigned instantly. The buyer approves the finished work and the project closes.

No negotiation. No portfolio rabbit holes. No three-day email thread to agree on a rate.

The services are pre-packaged with fixed prices and delivery timelines. Ratings are displayed per service — the Talking-Head Reel shows strong performance with thousands sold, and the Advanced Retention Reel also carries visible ratings. The model is closer to ordering off a menu than hiring a contractor.

This is the core insight Unjob is building on: most creative work for digital brands is repeatable enough to be productised. A D2C founder who needs a UGC ad every week doesn't need a new hiring process every week — they need a checkout button.

Who Invested and Why

Ruchi Rathor, CEO at Payomatix Technologies, wrote the ₹50 lakh pre-seed cheque. Her own post on LinkedIn explained the decision plainly:

That framing matters. At pre-seed, there is almost no product-market fit data to anchor a bet — the investor is buying the founder's model of the world. Rathor's conviction was about Taneja's thesis: that the same speed-and-certainty expectation Indians now have for groceries (Blinkit, Zepto, Swiggy Instamart) will migrate to digital services.

The quick commerce market in India is intensely competitive at the grocery layer — Blinkit holds roughly 50% share, Zepto 22%, Swiggy Instamart 24% — but no one has applied that infrastructure logic to intangible services. That's the white space Rathor backed.

How the Booking Model Works

The three-step flow Unjob describes on its site is deliberately friction-free: browse and check out, get a freelancer assigned instantly, approve and complete. What makes this different from a standard freelance marketplace is that the matching is removed from the buyer's hands entirely.

On Fiverr or Upwork, a buyer still has to evaluate 15 gig listings, read reviews, message sellers, wait for responses, and negotiate scope. That process can take days. Unjob pre-curates the freelancers, pre-packages the deliverables, and handles assignment algorithmically. The buyer's only decision is which service — not which person.

This is structurally identical to how Blinkit operates: you don't pick which warehouse worker picks your order. You pick the product; the platform handles the rest. Applying that to a video edit is a genuine product insight, not just a tagline.

For founders thinking about their own growth stacks, this is the same principle behind productising a service offering — remove the human bottleneck from the discovery layer and let buyers move at checkout speed.

What's Already Selling on the Platform

Unjob's site shows 200,000+ users and 5,000+ services sold on its best-selling Talking-Head Reel alone. The funding announcement from Dev Taneja's LinkedIn post (October 2025) cited 2,000+ freelancers onboarded and 400+ brands active on the platform.

The categories with the most visible traction are video editing (retention reels, UGC ad creatives, talking-head edits), AI content (AI-generated UGC ads, AI clone avatar videos, AI fashion videos), and design (thumbnails, UI screens). Prices range from roughly ₹1,300 ($15) for a basic thumbnail to ₹26,500 ($311) for a 10-screen app UI.

The price points are deliberately accessible — most services sit in a range that allows solo creators or early-stage D2C brands to approve without a procurement process. It's also the range that drives repeat purchases, which is the real metric quick commerce companies optimise for.

Who are the Freelancers on Unjob

Unjob has built its supply side around creators with existing audiences — not anonymous contractors. The platform's "Creator's Daily Partner" rail features names like Dev Taneja (@devtalksbusiness, 399K followers), Ankit Jha (@fullstackmodiji, 444K followers), and Anmol Malik (@agenticanmol, 90.8K followers).

This is a deliberate positioning move. Freelancers on Unjob aren't faceless gig workers — they're creators who have already demonstrated their output publicly. A brand booking a video edit from someone with a substantial subscriber base has a visible quality signal before the transaction. It's a trust shortcut that Fiverr's anonymous rating system can't replicate.

This also gives Unjob a distribution flywheel: the creators on the platform promote it to their own audiences, which brings in buyers, which brings in more creators. At 2,000+ freelancers and 400+ brands, the flywheel is early — but the structure is right.

How This is Different From Fiverr or Upwork

The honest answer: Fiverr and Upwork are search engines for freelancers. Unjob is a checkout for outputs.

On Fiverr, you search for "video editor," get 3,000 results, filter by price, read five profiles, message three people, wait for replies, and maybe start work in 48 hours. On Unjob, you pick a service, pay, and a freelancer is assigned. The cognitive load difference is significant for a founder who needs content weekly, not occasionally.

Unjob is also India-native in a way Fiverr isn't. The creator network is Indian, the pricing is accessible at Indian D2C budgets, and the platform is built around the content formats Indian brands actually need — UGC ads, retention reels, AI-generated creatives for Instagram and YouTube.

For context on how quick commerce logic is reshaping adjacent categories, the Kiddo ₹12.5 crore pre-seed round is another data point: investors are backing the "apply Blinkit speed to a new category" thesis across multiple verticals simultaneously.

What Quick Commerce Means for Services

Quick commerce — the model where you order something and it arrives in 10-30 minutes — has been proven for physical goods in India. Blinkit achieved positive adjusted EBITDA in Q4 FY2026. Zepto received SEBI approval for an IPO with an issue size of ₹11,000-12,000 crore. The model works.

But quick commerce for physical goods requires dark stores, cold chains, delivery riders, and significant capex per location. Quick commerce for digital services requires none of that. The "inventory" is skilled people. The "delivery" is a file upload. The marginal cost of a new order is close to zero.

As Karan Taurani, Executive Vice President at Elara Capital, has observed about the broader quick commerce shift: quick commerce is now 10-15% of India's e-commerce market and will continue expanding into new product categories. Digital services are a natural next frontier — and one where the unit economics are structurally better than groceries.

The question isn't whether the model works. It's whether Unjob can own the category before a Fiverr, a Toptal, or a well-funded Indian competitor applies the same logic at scale. That's what the ₹50 lakh is really buying: time to prove the thesis before the category gets crowded. The Zepto IPO metrics-first playbook is a useful reminder that quick commerce companies live or die on repeat order rates — a lesson Unjob will need to internalise early.

What the ₹50 Lakh is Being Used For

Dev Taneja's LinkedIn post described the next destination as "one of the world's biggest freelance marketplaces powered by AI" — with a Tinder-style matching mechanic where freelancers create reels showcasing their skills and brands swipe right to hire.

That product direction tells you where the ₹50 lakh is going: building the matching layer. Right now, Unjob assigns freelancers algorithmically based on availability and rating. The next version adds a discovery layer — freelancers pitch themselves through short-form video, brands browse and choose. It's a richer signal than a star rating, and it solves the trust problem that makes buyers hesitant on anonymous platforms.

At ₹50 lakh, this is genuinely a seed-of-an-idea cheque. It covers 6-12 months of lean product development, enough to validate whether the Tinder mechanic drives higher conversion and repeat purchase rates than the current checkout model. If it does, the next round becomes a much easier conversation.

Unjob is registered as Freeflow Technologies Private Limited and listed on the UP government's StartinUp portal, which confirms it is a formally incorporated entity — a non-trivial signal for a pre-seed company.

What are the Real Risks

Three risks are worth naming honestly.

Quality variance at scale. A Blinkit order is either the right product or it isn't — there's no subjective judgment. A video edit is different every time. As Unjob scales to thousands of orders, maintaining consistent quality across 2,000+ freelancers is operationally hard. The rating system helps, but one bad batch of edits for a brand with a product launch deadline is a churn event.

Freelancer economics. At the service price points offered, after platform fees, freelancers need to operate at volume to make the model viable. That's workable for high-volume creators, but top-tier editors have better options. Unjob needs to be the highest-volume channel for its freelancers, not just another platform they're listed on.

Category definition. "Quick commerce for services" is a compelling pitch, but the category doesn't yet exist in the buyer's mind. Unjob has to spend money educating the market that this is even possible — that you can book a video edit the way you order groceries. That's a marketing cost Blinkit never had to bear.

Who is the Founder

Dev Taneja is 25-26 years old, based in Bengaluru, and has been building Unjob for roughly a year. His background is in creative work — he ran a creative direction role at Devlok and founded Anime Devta before starting Unjob. He has 399K followers on his own creator account (@devtalksbusiness), which means he is both the founder and a user of the platform he's building.

That founder-user alignment is underrated. Taneja knows exactly what a creator needs when they're trying to produce content at volume — because he produces content at volume. He's not theorising about the problem; he lived it before he decided to solve it.

A year after the ₹50 lakh pre-seed, Unjob has 200,000+ users, 5,000+ services sold on a single SKU, and a creator network with a combined following in the millions. For a company that has raised less than what a single Blinkit dark store costs to set up, that's a real start.

Conclusion

Unjob's real bet isn't on freelancing — it's on attention span. Buyers who grew up ordering groceries in 10 minutes will not tolerate a 3-day hiring process for a video edit. The ₹50 lakh pre-seed is small by any standard, but the insight it's funding is sharp: remove the friction between "I need a reel" and "a freelancer is working on it" — and a large, repeat-purchase market opens up.