Factrika Raises Rs 8.9 Crore From Info Edge: Solving India’s Hidden Factory Floor Problem

Every morning across India’s manufacturing belts, factory managers run into the same quiet crisis before their shift even begins. Somewhere between a fifth and a quarter of the workers they expected to show up simply do not. Not because of any dramatic labour dispute, but because of something far more mundane, a fragmented, old fashioned contractor system that has never been built to guarantee reliability.

Factrika, a Delhi based on demand industrial workforce platform, has raised eight point nine crore rupees in a seed funding round led by Info Edge, the investment firm behind some of India’s most recognisable internet businesses. The round is a bet that this unglamorous, unsexy problem, simply getting enough verified factory workers to show up on time, is worth solving with real technology rather than another round of phone calls to a local labour contractor.

Here is what the company actually does, who is behind it, and why an investor with Info Edge’s track record decided this was worth backing.

Quick Answer

Factrika, an on demand industrial workforce platform founded in July twenty twenty four by Kshitij Puri and Gaurav Asthana, has raised eight point nine crore rupees in a seed funding round led by Info Edge. The Delhi based startup connects manufacturers with verified factory workers matched by skill and availability, enabling deployment within two hours in many cases. The company says it already has more than ten thousand registered workers across over twenty skill categories, with deployment hours growing between fifty and seventy percent month on month. The fresh capital will go toward expanding the founding team, deepening the technology platform, and extending operations into additional industrial clusters beyond its current base of Bhiwadi, Manesar, Bawal, Noida and Bahadurgarh.

About This Article

This article has been researched and written by the FinanceChecks editorial team, based on publicly available funding disclosures, official company statements from Factrika, and reporting from multiple Indian business and startup news outlets covering the round.

FinanceChecks holds no commercial relationship with Factrika, Info Edge, or any individual named in this article. This piece is intended purely as business and market reporting, not investment advice or a promotional endorsement of the company or its platform.

Last reviewed September twenty twenty six.

The Problem Factrika Says It Is Solving

The company’s own framing of the problem is blunt and specific. Indian factories face a daily worker shortage of roughly twenty to twenty five percent, driven largely by a staffing system that still runs through fragmented, low technology contractor networks rather than any centralised, verifiable system. The result, according to the company, is lost production output, higher operating costs, and constant disruption to manufacturing schedules that could otherwise run predictably.

This is a genuinely underexamined corner of India’s labour market compared to how much attention white collar hiring platforms and gig economy delivery work tend to receive. A factory that cannot reliably predict how many workers will actually show up on a given day cannot reliably predict its own output, and that uncertainty compounds across a supply chain in ways that are expensive and hard to trace back to their root cause.

How the Factrika Platform Actually Works

Factrika positions itself as a real time matching layer between manufacturers and workers. Employers looking for staff can identify and request workers matched specifically by the skills and shift availability they need, with the company claiming it can deploy verified workers within two hours of a request in many cases, a meaningful improvement over the delays typical of traditional contractor based staffing.

On the worker side, shifts are accepted digitally rather than through informal word of mouth arrangements, and the platform itself handles attendance tracking and payments, removing two of the most common friction points and trust gaps in traditional contractor labour arrangements. Perhaps most interesting from a longer term perspective, Factrika builds a verified digital work record for each worker over time, documenting their skills and experience in a form that can support genuine career progression rather than leaving a worker’s accumulated experience essentially undocumented and untransferable between jobs, which has historically been the norm in this segment of the workforce.

The company reports a worker show up rate above ninety percent on its platform, a figure worth sitting with given that unreliable attendance is the exact problem the entire business exists to solve. It also claims that workers using the platform can increase their earnings by twenty to thirty percent through skill based progression into higher value roles over time, framing the platform as something that benefits workers directly rather than existing purely as a tool for manufacturers.

Who Is Behind Factrika

Kshitij Puri, one of the company’s two co founders, is a second time entrepreneur. He previously built and scaled ZipLoan, a fintech non banking financial company, giving him direct prior experience building and running a lending focused technology business before turning his attention to industrial workforce management. He holds a background from UCLA Anderson and is a member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India.

His co founder, Gaurav Asthana, brings a notably broad operating background, more than two decades of experience spanning technology, operations and product roles across recruitment, fintech, agritech and marketplace businesses. He is an alumnus of BITS Pilani and IIM Ahmedabad. Between the two founders, the combination of deep financial services building experience and multi sector operating experience across marketplace style businesses appears to be a meaningful part of what convinced Info Edge to back the company this early.

Why Info Edge Backing This Matters

Info Edge is not a generic early stage investor writing scattershot cheques across unrelated sectors. The firm built and continues to operate Naukri dot com, one of India’s most established job and recruitment platforms, along with stakes in other consumer internet businesses. An investment from a firm with that specific institutional knowledge of India’s employment and hiring landscape carries a different kind of signal than a purely financial investor writing the same cheque, since Info Edge’s team is likely evaluating this bet with genuine, hard won expertise in how labour marketplaces actually function and scale in the Indian context.

Hitesh Oberoi, the managing director and chief executive of Info Edge, described Factrika as addressing deep, specific use cases within Indian manufacturing recruitment through an innovative, platform based approach, framing the investment as backing a company solving a real structural problem rather than chasing a trend.

Who Is Already Using Factrika Platform

Factrika is not operating purely on early stage promise. The company has named a client roster that includes Lenskart, Munjal Kiriu, Asahi India Glass, Jubilant Foodworks, Epack Durables, PG Technoplast, Hanon Climate, Bidso and Talbros Auto Components, a mix spanning eyewear, glass manufacturing, food production and auto components. Landing recognisable manufacturing names this early is a meaningful signal that the platform is solving a problem real operators are willing to pay to fix, rather than one that exists mainly in a pitch deck.

The company’s growth claims are specific rather than vague, deployment hours on the platform have grown between fifty and seventy percent month on month, and its current registered worker base exceeds ten thousand people spread across more than twenty distinct skill categories.

The Market Opportunity and the Competition

Factrika is framing its addressable opportunity around what it estimates to be a twenty three billion dollar manufacturing workforce market in India, a figure that reflects just how large and fragmented the underlying labour need actually is across the country’s industrial base.

It is not the only company chasing this opportunity. The broader digital industrial and blue collar workforce space in India has seen a wave of platforms applying mobile based hiring, worker verification, digital matching and workforce management tools to connect enterprises with frontline labour. WorkIndia, a more established player in adjacent blue collar hiring, raised ninety seven crore rupees in a Series B round led by Aavishkaar Capital with participation from BEENEXT just last December, underscoring that investor appetite for this category already exists well beyond this single seed round.

Factrika’s specific angle within that broader competitive set is its narrow focus on industrial and factory floor workers specifically, rather than blue collar work more broadly, paired with its emphasis on the two hour deployment window and the verified digital work history it builds for each worker over time.

What Happens Next

With the fresh capital, Factrika plans to grow its internal team, continue developing its technology platform, and expand beyond its current five city footprint of Bhiwadi, Manesar, Bawal, Noida and Bahadurgarh into additional industrial clusters across the country. Given how geographically concentrated India’s manufacturing hubs tend to be, this expansion path likely means targeting other established industrial belts where a similar density of factories and a similar staffing problem already exists.

My Take

What I find genuinely compelling about this deal is how unfashionable the underlying problem is. Indian startup funding conversations tend to gravitate toward artificial intelligence, consumer apps and fintech, and a company solving factory floor staffing reliability does not carry the same immediate excitement as those categories. That is precisely why it is worth paying attention to. A twenty to twenty five percent daily worker shortage is not a minor inefficiency, it is a structural drag on manufacturing output across an entire country that has explicitly staked its economic growth strategy on expanding domestic manufacturing.

The founder combination here also strikes me as a genuinely sensible pairing rather than a coincidental one. A founder with real fintech and lending operating experience alongside a founder with two decades of marketplace and operations experience across multiple sectors gives Factrika a mix of skills that matches what this business actually needs, since managing worker payments and attendance at scale is, underneath the surface, as much a financial operations problem as it is a staffing one.

Where I would want to see more clarity over time is retention, both of the workers registered on the platform and of the manufacturing clients using it. A ninety percent show up rate and month on month growth in deployment hours are strong early indicators, but the real test of a workforce marketplace like this is usually visible only after a year or two, once the initial novelty of a new platform wears off and workers and manufacturers alike default back to whichever option is genuinely easiest and most reliable for them. If Factrika’s digital work history feature genuinely helps workers earn more over time, that could become a powerful retention mechanic on the worker side that a purely transactional staffing platform would lack.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much funding did Factrika raise Factrika raised?

Eight point nine crore rupees in a seed funding round led by Info Edge.

Who founded Factrika?

Factrika was founded in July twenty twenty four by Kshitij Puri, a second time founder who previously built the fintech company ZipLoan, and Gaurav Asthana, who brings more than two decades of experience across technology, operations and product roles.

What does Factrika actually do?

Factrika is an on demand industrial workforce platform that connects manufacturers with verified factory workers matched by skill and shift availability, handling worker onboarding, attendance and payments while building a digital work history for each worker.

Why are Indian factories facing a worker shortage?

Factrika attributes the shortage, which it estimates at twenty to twenty five percent daily, mainly to fragmented, low technology contractor based staffing models that make it difficult for manufacturers to reliably predict worker availability.

How fast can Factrika deploy workers to a factory?

The company says it can identify and deploy verified workers within two hours of a request in many cases, compared to the longer delays typical of traditional contractor staffing arrangements.

Which companies use Factrika?

Factrika’s stated client base includes Lenskart, Munjal Kiriu, Asahi India Glass, Jubilant Foodworks, Epack Durables, PG Technoplast, Hanon Climate, Bidso and Talbros Auto Components.

Where does Factrika currently operate?

The company currently operates across Bhiwadi, Manesar, Bawal, Noida and Bahadurgarh, with plans to expand into additional industrial clusters across India using its new funding.

Who led Factrika’s funding round?

The seed round was led by Info Edge, the investment firm known for building and backing Naukri dot com and other established Indian internet businesses.

How big is the market?

Factrika is targeting The company estimates India’s manufacturing workforce opportunity at around twenty three billion dollars.

Does Factrika have competitors?

Yes, the broader Indian blue collar and industrial workforce technology space includes other platforms such as WorkIndia, which raised ninety seven crore rupees in a Series B round led by Aavishkaar Capital in December of the previous year.

Disclaimer

This article is intended purely for general informational and business news purposes. It is based on publicly available funding announcements and media reporting available at the time of writing and does not constitute investment advice, financial advice, or an endorsement of Factrika, Info Edge, or any individual, client or product mentioned.

FinanceChecks is an independent publication with no financial or commercial relationship with any party discussed in this article. Figures such as worker show up rates, deployment growth percentages and market size estimates are based on the company’s own public statements and have not been independently verified by FinanceChecks.

Readers should not treat any information in this article as a recommendation to invest in Factrika, Info Edge, or any related entity. Startup investments carry significant risk, and early stage companies frequently do not achieve the growth trajectories suggested by early operating metrics. Please conduct independent research and consult a qualified financial adviser before making any investment decisions.