Industrial workforce startup Factrika has raised ₹8.9 crore in seed funding led by Info Edge, giving it fresh capital to expand a platform designed to help factories find skilled workers when they need them.
The funding was announced publicly on September 17, although Info Edge had disclosed the proposed investment to shareholders a month earlier. In an August 14 stock-exchange disclosure, the company said it had approved an investment agreement with Udyogtech Ventures Private Limited, which operates Factrika, and its founders.
Factrika plans to spend the money on its team, technology and expansion into more industrial clusters. The company has identified Bhiwadi, Manesar, Bawal, Noida and Bahadurgarh among its initial focus markets.
For Factrika, the opportunity lies in a problem that is familiar to many manufacturers but isn't easily solved by a conventional recruitment portal: having enough appropriately skilled workers available for a particular shift, at a particular factory, at short notice.
Info Edge Takes an 18.58% Stake
Info Edge's board approved the investment on August 14, 2026.
Under the first tranche of the transaction, the company agreed to subscribe to one equity share and 3,098 compulsorily convertible preference shares of Udyogtech Ventures.
The investment totals about ₹8.90 crore and gives Info Edge an 18.58% stake in Factrika on a fully converted and diluted basis. The deal has been structured in two tranches.
Available disclosures indicate that a potential second tranche could take Info Edge's holding to around 26%.
The investment also brings together two businesses operating in different parts of the recruitment market. Info Edge has spent years building online recruitment businesses, while Factrika is concentrating specifically on industrial labour and the practical challenges involved in getting workers onto factory floors.
Info Edge Managing Director and CEO Hitesh Oberoi said: “Factrika is solving deep use cases in Indian manufacturing recruitment with an innovative, platform based approach. We're excited to back them.”
How Factrika Works
Founded in July 2024 by Kshitij Puri and Gaurav Asthana, Factrika isn't positioned simply as a jobs portal.
Factories can use its platform to search for verified workers based on skills and availability. Factrika says workers can be deployed within two hours, although that figure is a company claim and has not been independently verified.
Workers can accept shifts digitally, while attendance and payments are handled through the platform. Factrika also creates a digital record of a worker's employment history, which the company says can help workers progress to roles requiring higher skills.
That model is built around the realities of industrial hiring.
Knowing how many workers a factory needs is one thing. Finding people with the right skills who are available nearby and will actually arrive for a scheduled shift can be a much harder problem.
Factrika's founders describe this as an issue of availability and reliability.
“India's manufacturing workforce has a fundamental availability and reliability problem. We're building Factrika to make industrial workforce supply more real time, skill led and transparent,” Puri and Asthana said in a statement released around the funding announcement.
Factrika Says More Than 10,000 Workers Are Registered
Factrika says its platform now has more than 10,000 registered workers across over 20 skill categories, with a worker show-up rate of more than 90%.
The startup also reports that deployment hours through its platform are growing by 50% to 70% month on month. These figures come from the company and were not independently audited in the sources reviewed by JantaScope.
Its reported customer base includes Lenskart, Munjal Kiriu, Asahi India Glass, Jubilant Foods, Epack Durables, PG Technoplast, Hanon Climate, Bidso and Talbros Auto Components.
Factrika also says workers can earn 20% to 30% more through skill progression on the platform. That should be treated as a company claim rather than an independently established outcome across its workforce.
For a business like Factrika, the number of registered workers only tells part of the story. What factories ultimately need is a reliable supply of people who have the right skills and actually turn up when scheduled.
That helps explain the company's focus on show-up rates and deployment hours rather than simply promoting the size of its worker database.
The Factory Staffing Problem Factrika Wants to Fix
Factrika estimates that factories in India face a 20% to 25% daily worker shortage.
The startup says fragmented, contractor-led staffing systems are partly responsible, making it harder for manufacturers to respond quickly when labour requirements suddenly change.
JantaScope could not independently verify the 20%-25% figure as a national manufacturing statistic. It should therefore be read as Factrika's estimate, not an official measure.
The situation Factrika is targeting can arise for several reasons.
A manufacturer might need to add another shift to complete an order, increase production during a busy period or replace workers who are unexpectedly absent. A traditional hiring process isn't necessarily built to fill those gaps within hours.
Factrika wants factories to be able to see available workers, match them according to their skills and deploy them more quickly, while using the same system to manage attendance and payments.
Why Info Edge Is Interested
Info Edge's involvement is particularly relevant given its experience in India's online recruitment industry.
Factrika, however, is addressing a different hiring environment from the one typically associated with a conventional online jobs platform.
Matching a candidate with an employer is only one part of industrial staffing.
A factory also needs to know whether the worker is genuinely available, has the required skills, can reach the plant for the shift and ultimately reports for work.
In that sense, Factrika is trying to combine recruitment technology with workforce operations rather than operating only as a digital jobs marketplace.
Info Edge's regulatory disclosure also offers some perspective on the startup's size. Information reported from the filing puts Factrika's unaudited turnover for the year ended March 31, 2026 at ₹3.69 crore.
For a company founded in 2024, the investment is coming relatively early in its development.
Manufacturing Expansion Changes the Hiring Equation
India's effort to expand manufacturing isn't only about adding factories and machinery. More production capacity also creates demand for workers who can run production lines, maintain equipment and perform specialised industrial jobs.
Hiring those workers comes with challenges that can be quite different from white-collar recruitment.
Factories are tied to physical locations. A worker's proximity to a plant, shift availability, technical skills and attendance can be just as important as previous employment experience.
Factrika's expansion strategy reflects that reality.
Rather than trying to cover India all at once, the company is concentrating on manufacturing centres such as Manesar, Bhiwadi, Bawal, Noida and Bahadurgarh.
A concentrated network of workers around individual industrial hubs could make rapid deployment easier. Expanding that model, however, will require more than software. Factrika will need enough workers in each location, along with verification and operational support on the ground.
What Comes After the ₹8.9-Crore Funding?
The new capital gives Factrika room to expand, but its performance will ultimately depend on what happens inside the factories using its platform.
Three numbers are likely to be particularly useful in judging that progress: how quickly Factrika can provide suitable workers, how consistently those workers report for their shifts, and whether manufacturers continue using the service after their initial deployments.
The company's reported 90%-plus show-up rate and 50%-70% month-on-month growth in deployment hours suggest early traction if those levels can be sustained. They remain company-reported figures, however, rather than independently audited operating data.
Maintaining those numbers may become harder as Factrika expands. Supplying workers across a handful of concentrated manufacturing clusters is a different operational challenge from doing the same thing across dozens of locations.
There is also the question of what the platform delivers for workers themselves.
Factrika wants its digital employment records and skill-progression system to help workers move into better-paying roles. It says workers can increase their earnings by 20%-30% through progression, but longer-term evidence will be needed to establish how widely that happens.
Info Edge's investment brings Factrika both capital and a backer with considerable experience in India's recruitment market. Factrika's next stage will show whether that experience can translate from online recruitment into the more operational challenge of supplying verified workers to factories at short notice.
Its expansion into additional manufacturing clusters should provide a clearer test of whether the speed and reliability the company currently reports can be maintained as the platform grows.
