Apna eyes ₹150 crore revenue from AI-led push for India’s 300 million blue-collar workers (original) (raw)

Kartik Narayan, CEO, Apna

Inside Mumbai’s Kandivali suburb, 19-year-old Kaushal Mehta, who recently cleared his Class 12 examinations with 45 per cent marks from a Gujarati-medium school, is practising customer-service interview questions with a Gujarati-speaking AI chatbot as he prepares for a call-centre job at the Government of India-supported Apna Atal Incubation Center. A few feet away, Vijay Prajapati, a student at a night school in Malad West, is training through a voice-based assessment tool for a debt recovery role at a financial services company.

For millions like Mehta and Prajapati, entry into organised corporate India has historically remained difficult. While the country’s roughly 50 million white-collar professionals operate through resumes, LinkedIn profiles, placement systems and online job portals such as Naukri, Foundit and Shine.com, India’s far larger blue and grey-collar workforce of more than 300 million workers still depends heavily on contractors, informal referrals and fragmented local hiring networks.

Tiger Global-backed Apna is betting artificial intelligence can bridge that divide. The Bengaluru-based company, which has raised nearly $194 million from investors including Peak XV Partners, Insight Partners and Owl Ventures, is using multilingual AI interview bots, automated assessments and employability tools to help first-time workers transition into organised sectors such as financial services, retail, customer support and logistics, a strategy it believes can help scale revenue to nearly ₹150 crore by FY27.

“There is no way that a driver, cook, technician or plumber can suddenly jump from the blue economy into the corporate economy,” Apna Chief Executive Officer Kartik Narayan told businessline.

From Informal India To Corporate India

Apna increasingly sees itself not merely as a hiring platform, but as an employability and workforce infrastructure layer for India’s informal labour economy. Out of India’s nearly 90 crore working-age population, only around 8 crore workers are formally registered under EPFO systems, underscoring how much of the country’s labour force still remains outside organised employment structures.

“Entry-level jobs are often a matter of accident, not choice,” Narayan said, pointing to how millions of workers remain trapped within informal and hyper-local employment ecosystems.

Apna initially built scale by targeting India’s underpenetrated blue and grey-collar hiring market, an area traditional white-collar recruitment platforms never meaningfully entered. But the company says the next phase of growth lies in helping workers move upward into customer service, banking, telecom, retail and financial-services roles.

“Nobody wants to do a blue-collar job beyond a point,” Narayan said. According to the company, more than 50 per cent of jobs listed on Apna are now white-collar roles, reflecting rising demand from workers seeking mobility into formal corporate sectors.

Why AI Matters

Unlike white-collar recruitment, where candidates usually arrive with resumes and digital identities, blue-collar hiring often suffers from weak verification systems, language barriers and high churn rates.

“How do I reach out to somebody in Bihar or Uttar Pradesh and ask him for his resume?” Narayan said, explaining why AI-led onboarding and voice-based hiring systems are becoming critical for mass recruitment.

Apna says AI can reduce some of those friction points through multilingual voice bots, mock interviews, automated screening tools and radius-based job matching systems designed for first-time workers entering organised employment.

“Practising and failing in a safe environment is much better than failing in a real interview,” Narayan said while explaining the thinking behind the Kandivali AI centre.

The Bigger Bet

Apna’s broader bet is that employability infrastructure could emerge as one of India’s next major digital opportunity pools as the country formalises its workforce.

India’s gig workforce is projected to exceed 23 million workers by 2030, while more than 63 million MSMEs still depend heavily on fragmented local hiring ecosystems.

The company’s monetisation strategy is increasingly moving beyond basic job listings into enterprise hiring automation, premium hiring products for businesses and API integrations with payroll and HR software firms

Published on June 8, 2026