Urban Company spends to defend turf as Snabbit, Pronto chase ‘instant help’ boom

Urban Company is looking to tighten its grip on India’s fast-evolving home-services market just as a wave of upstarts backed by venture capital begins to crowd its turf. Startups, including Snabbit and Pronto, have lured tens of millions of dollars to chase the same instant help-at-home opportunity that Urban Company is already trying to turn into a mass habit. The newly listed company is spending to defend its lead. Despite revenue rising 23.7% year-on-year in Q2 FY26 for its India consumer services (excluding Instahelp), profitability sharply deteriorated. Adjusted EBITDA dropped 61.4%, from Rs 26.2 crore in Q2 FY25 to just Rs 10.1 crore this quarter. “This decline is a result of deliberate investments we have made in training, audit, customer support, new user acquisition led by brand marketing, investments towards faster fulfilment, and investments in technology and AI,” CEO Abhiraj Singh Bhal told investors in the earnings call. Between FY23 and FY25, Urban Company lifted margins from negative 9.7% to positive 3.3%. Now, the company is treating FY26 as a “period of reinvestment” to build a “long-term compounding core” Much of that reinvestment is flowing into Instahelp, the company's newest and most ambitious bet. Unlike Urban Company's traditional occasional services—a plumber once a month, a beautician for a wedding—Instahelp offers daily housekeeping: maids and domestic help who come to your home regularly. It's this high-frequency service that directly competes with what Snabbit and Pronto offer. In just eight months, Instahelp scaled to 4.7 lakh monthly orders, but it’s bleeding cash: Rs 44 crore in adjusted EBITDA losses this quarter alone. “We recognise that these investments impact short-term profitability, but the opportunity in Instahelp is both significant and immediate,” he said. The vertical has lost over Rs 52 crore this financial year. Urban Company believes it’s worth it. “We see Instahelp as a long-term investment, one that deepens customer engagement with our app, improves the frequency of usage, and also expands our overall time,” Bhal told analysts. That logic now faces its toughest test yet. Snabbit, founded in 2024, just raised $30 million at a $180 million valuation, claiming to deliver home help within 10 minutes through a 5,000-strong, women-led fleet across five cities. Pronto, also launched in 2024, secured $11 million in August this year from General Catalyst and Glade Brook Capital to expand its “shift-based” model that promises reliability by controlling the entire labour supply chain. Both companies are targeting Urban Company’s core demographic: dual-income urban professionals who can't spare much time for chores. Urban Company’s leadership seems unfazed, at least publicly. “The category is early and evolving. We would like to continue to deliver great customer experiences and firmly cement this market leadership, just as we have in our core services business,” Bhal said during the Q&A. The company's strategy hinges on what it calls "micro-market densification"—packing enough customers and service partners into the same neighbourhood so jobs can be matched nearby, reducing travel time and idle periods for workers. In practice, that approach improves partner utilisation, measured by the average number of paid hours a worker spends on jobs each month. Urban Company says utilisation has climbed from 59 hours per month in FY22 to 89 hours in the first half of FY26, driven by tighter clustering of demand and supply. "As we densify micro markets, our service professionals spend less time waiting for jobs or travelling between jobs and more time inside consumers' homes," Bhal explained. The company pointed to an early proof: in its most mature neighbourhoods, the top 5% of service partners are already clocking 150 hours per month—nearly double the platform average. (Edited by Kanishk Singh)