In a country where millions of blue-collar workers remain disconnected from formal job markets, one of India’s most urgent challenges is making employment accessible, equitable, and efficient at scale.
Vahan AI, a YC-backed AI recruitment startup, announced that it is using OpenAI’s technology to improve how blue-collar workers are hired across India.
The company, founded in 2016 by Madhav Krishna, aims to address hiring challenges for blue-collar workers in India using AI. The platform matches job seekers with relevant roles and helps employers find suitable candidates.
It has placed at least five lakh workers in more than 480 cities and works with companies including Zomato, Swiggy, Flipkart, Zepto, Blinkit, Amazon, Rapido, and Uber.
“We’re finding that even with a fairly early version of this AI recruiter, we’re able to increase human recruiter productivity by 300%,” Krishna said in an interaction with AIM regarding the efficiency of this.
Bridging Employers and Blue-Collar Workers
Vahan AI is reshaping how employers like Zomato and Swiggy connect with India’s vast informal workforce. The platform doesn’t seek to replace human recruiters but to amplify their effectiveness using smart automation.
“So what we’ve built, the AI recruiter, is not a replacement for human recruiters,” Krishna added.
Instead, the AI recruiter acts as a digital assistant—qualifying candidates, answering their questions, and even handling document verification. This has had a transformational impact on recruitment agencies using the platform.
“We’re finding that even with a fairly early version of this AI recruiter, we’re able to increase human recruiter productivity by 300%.”
While the AI recruiter currently supports English and Hindi, the challenge of India’s linguistic diversity remains.
“In Hindi alone, the word yes is said in over 20 ways,” Krishna pointed out, highlighting how this feature would be particularly valuable in a linguistically diverse country like India, where overcoming language barriers is crucial to enabling millions to access employment opportunities with greater ease and confidence.
To address this, Vahan is expanding support to eight more Indian languages, working closely with OpenAI and Eleven Labs to ensure inclusivity across dialects and regions.
Moreover, another facet of Vahan’s success is its network of local entrepreneurial partners, called Vahan Leaders (VLs). These are small recruitment agencies operating in smaller towns, often overlooked by employers across the country.
According to the company’s official statement, over the past 15 months, some VLs in India have grown their operations by up to 10 times. In Bengaluru, four VLs now manage to place over 2,000 workers each month. In the NCR region, placements have increased to 3,500 per month in three months. Notably, Mumbai has also recorded a rise in placements through the platform.
These local leaders use Vahan’s tools to help place workers in jobs while maintaining the trust and cultural context needed for success in rural India.
In a previous interview with AIM, Krishna stated that while global markets like Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and potentially South America are of definite interest to the company, India remains a massive opportunity. Thus, Vahan.ai intends to stay focused on the Indian market for the next few years.
“What we’re seeing on the ground is remarkable: people who were previously excluded from formal employment channels are now finding jobs in hours, not months,” he added.
OpenAI’s Expanding Role in India
India represents both a massive user base and a growing developer hub for AI labs like OpenAI, which is ramping up its presence in the country. This is why OpenAI has increasingly been collaborating with Indian startups to bring real-world AI solutions to scale, and Vahan is a case in point.
“India is strategically important…we are the second largest base of developers in the world,” Krishna added. “There’s a very tight startups team at OpenAI…who help bridge the gap between what startups are trying to build in terms of use cases and their platform.”
In addition to this, Vahan is also part of the influential Y Combinator network, which has been pivotal in shaping India’s tech startup landscape.
Vahan.ai began as an upskilling platform but pivoted in 2019 after struggling to grow at scale. Krishna noted that skilling felt optional, while job placement addressed a more urgent need.
The company joined Y Combinator in 2019 and raised a Series A in 2021. This was followed by a $10 million in Series B funding from Khosla Ventures, with support from Y Combinator and Gaingels LLC. It is the third Indian AI startup to receive such backing from Khosla, after Sarvam AI and upliance.ai.
Krishna declined to comment on future funding plans.
