Instant House Help Race Burns Rs 316 Crore

India's race to deliver domestic help in minutes is getting faster and more expensive at the same time. Urban Company's instant house help vertical InstaHelp posted a segment loss of Rs 173.12 crore in the September quarter, more than four times the Rs 42.91 crore loss a year earlier, even as its net transaction value rose 34 per cent quarter on quarter to Rs 71 crore. The instant house help battle is now a straight fight between the listed home-services platform and well-funded startups Snabbit and Pronto, and all three are burning cash to win market share. ## Instant house help becomes a cash-burn battle Urban Company's September quarter results, released on Thursday, show the scale of the investment. Consolidated net loss more than tripled year on year to Rs 182.5 crore, while operating revenue rose 41.4 per cent to Rs 537.29 crore. InstaHelp fulfilled 6.2 million orders in the quarter, a 63 per cent jump over the previous three months, generating Rs 20.54 crore in revenue, up from just Rs 1.43 crore a year ago. But net order value fell from Rs 138 to Rs 114 on competitive intensity and introductory pricing. The company is explicit that the red ink will continue. In its filing, it said it was prioritising market leadership in this phase of category development and expected InstaHelp losses to remain elevated for a few more quarters before they begin to come down. Co-founder and chief executive Abhiraj Singh Bhal has previously said the firm is optimising to win and capture market share, and is prepared to match competitive irrationality from time to time. ## The unit economics behind the burn The unit economics explain why investors are nervous. In the October to December quarter, the platform disclosed that each of its 1.61 million home-help orders incurred a loss of Rs 381, and that order values need to almost double to break even. InstaHelp is the platform's highest-frequency offering and a source of new users for core services, which is why management keeps spending: adjusted earnings excluding the vertical reached Rs 30 crore, up 213 per cent. Research houses estimate the eventual addressable market could support four to six million orders a day across 30 to 40 million households. The market is broadly split into three use cases: ad hoc users who treat the service as an emergency backup, supplementary users who book four to six times a month, and primary users who rely on it 18 to 20 days a month. ## Snabbit matches the leader on instant house help The challengers are not standing still. Snabbit, co-founded by Aayush Agarwal, recorded a net transaction value of Rs 72 crore in the September quarter, marginally ahead of InstaHelp's Rs 71 crore, while reporting a lower burn of Rs 142 crore against InstaHelp's adjusted EBITDA loss of Rs 174 crore. The startup processed 6.4 million orders in the quarter. In fiscal 2026 it reported Rs 12.25 crore in operating revenue and a net loss of Rs 168 crore, after its daily jobs grew 75 times during the year. Pronto, backed by Bain Capital, closed a $45 million Series B round in May at a $200 million valuation and logged a record 22,000 daily bookings in March, up from 2,500 daily orders in October. All three platforms remain loss-making, squeezed by deep discounting and rising operational costs. The segment has also drawn scrutiny over worker conditions and earnings. ## When will the instant house help bleeding stop? The pattern is familiar from India's cab and food-delivery wars: chase scale first, fix economics later. The InstaHelp losses of the September quarter show how far the instant house help leaders still are from profitability. Industry watchers expect that once demand stabilises and supply becomes sufficient, incentives will be narrowed and the earn-as-you-go model will tighten for workers. Urban Company has guided for adjusted EBITDA break-even by the third quarter of fiscal 2028 and Rs 1,000 crore in adjusted EBITDA by fiscal 2031. Whether the instant house help leaders reach that destination at current burn rates, or must raise prices first, will decide how large this market can truly become. For now, the InstaHelp losses keep mounting, and the instant house help race shows no sign of slowing.