Mondovia began at home in Gurugram, with something entirely ordinary: we needed a nanny and a cook, at the point when we needed that support most.
What followed was not a search so much as a series of accidents. The process ran on agents, informal references and chance. Placement fees were high enough to be a real decision in themselves. And for all that money and effort, there was no methodical way to match what a particular worker could actually do — her skills, her experience, what she wanted from the arrangement — against what our household actually needed.
The failure runs in both directions, which is the part that stayed with me. We had no reliable way to know who we were meeting. She had no way to demonstrate a decade of work she had genuinely done. Workers in this market are not short of skill or of willingness. They are short of any means to prove either, and that gap is filled by whoever happens to be standing in the middle.
Meanwhile the need keeps growing. Family structures are changing quickly, and with them the demand for dependable support across childcare, elder care, full-time cooking, cleaning and running a household. More families will need this arrangement to work, and more people will build their livelihoods inside it.
So it became clear that this market did not need another placement service. It needed an identity and matching layer underneath — something that lets a worker carry a verified record of her own experience, and lets a family find the right support with real confidence rather than a recommendation and a hope.
I spent the previous fourteen years building and scaling consumer technology in fintech, travel and e-commerce — at Paytm, MakeMyTrip, Goibibo and Flipkart. The consistent lesson across all of them is that fragmented markets do not get fixed by better intentions. They get fixed when technology, verified data, trust and payments are assembled into infrastructure that makes the honest transaction the easy one. That machinery is mature. It has simply never been pointed at this market.
Mondovia is therefore built as infrastructure rather than as an agency, and the reason is structural rather than cosmetic. An agency earns its living by keeping the introduction scarce. A rail earns its living when traffic runs across it. Only one of those two businesses actually wants this market to become transparent.
We start with domestic staffing in India, through Saathi, because a rail nobody has ridden is only a drawing. The longer ambition is to support human-capital mobility more broadly — across occupations, across cities, and eventually across borders.
If you are building in this market, regulating it, hiring through it, or working in it, I would like to hear from you.