Retail is in detail. And this is a fact Urban Company knows all too well. As India’s largest home services platform, Urban Company, operates at scale across geographies and categories to cater to customers who need convenience and quick services. Given the frequency and relevance of Urban Company’s services to the average Indian household, data is the building block of its business.
Urban Company’s online on-demand services market is projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 22.4% by 2030, according to Grand View Research.
Data and technology play a strategic role in Urban Company’s evolution across India, the UAE, Singapore, and Australia.
Driving this next phase of growth is Kanav Arora, SVP of Engineering, who is driving the tangible impact of data and AI on Urban Company’s business growth journey.In this interview with ETCIO, Kanav Arora, SVP of Engineering, Urban Company discusses how a modern, cloud-native approach to data can unlock new business value, transform user experiences, and fuel expansion in a highly competitive marketplace. He shares data-driven lessons, hard metrics, and insights on forging a future-ready, customer-centric organization through data, and AI.
Consumers, particularly in metropolitan areas and Tier 1 cities, are undergoing a steady transition from a value-seeking to a convenience-seeking lifestyle. This shift is the key differentiator for achieving customer loyalty, deeper customer engagement, and brand relevance. As India’s largest home-services provider, how is Urban Company’s value proposition different from others in the market?
Urban Company’s value proposition stands out because it is a full-stack, tech-enabled home services ecosystem and not a service aggregator. We own the end-to-end delivery by onboarding, training, and equipping professionals with products and tools, thereby standardizing service quality.Further, Urban Company has diversified into products and solutions. Under the Native brand, we offer water purifiers and smart locks, while under Revamp, we provide modular wall panels for home improvement.
Indian retail and service delivery is undergoing a significant transformation. Quick commerce is emerging as one of the most defining trends of the decade. From groceries to gadgets and now services, the Indian consumer has increasingly come to expect instant gratification. Organizations, both established and emerging, are racing to meet this expectation. Urban Company has also evolved its business model and pivoted towards delivering services within an hour. Technology will play a key role in improving instant service delivery. How are you using technology to drive business growth? What are some of the innovations the company is driving for its customers and partners?
Technology really is the backbone of Urban Company. We lean heavily into cutting-edge tech to empower every part of our business — whether it’s customers, partners, or our internal teams. For example, we’re already using GenAI-powered voice bots to onboard partners seamlessly onto the platform.
Quality is one of our most important metrics, so we leverage images captured by professionals to assess service outcomes and ensure true customer satisfaction. Our help center, too, is now completely powered by GenAI, which allows us to deliver faster, more contextual, and personalized support.
At the same time, we’re investing deeply in our platform engineering, because that’s what makes it possible for hundreds of our engineers to ship with speed, scale, and reliability. And beyond these, AI and data-driven systems are playing a huge role across the lifecycle of our customer and partner journeys.
Urban Company operates at scale across geographies and categories. You are also tapping into the emerging demand for on-demand, real-time services. In enabling this, you generate vast amounts of structured and unstructured data. How are you leveraging AI Data Cloud to improve data-driven decision-making, and service delivery, particularly during high-demand peak times?
Yes, you are right. We do operate at scale across geographies and categories, and we are generating massive amounts of structured and unstructured data daily. Data has really transformed the way we manage service delivery, especially during high-demand peak times.
We are leveraging Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud. It offers us the scalability, flexibility, and performance we needed. Today, we have full visibility into supply–demand dynamics across all our hubs, which allows us to be much more proactive rather than reactive. We’ve built robust AI models, like our Reliability Score Model (RSM), which predicts how well our demand can actually be serviced in real time. This helps us allocate professionals more intelligently and ensures customers don’t face last-minute cancellations or delays.
But I’d say the real unlock has been in quality. Beyond just fulfilling demand, we use data extensively to make sure the service delivered meets the highest standard. Whether it’s through predictive models, quality checks, or real-time feedback loops, we’re able to step in with corrective measures if needed. That combination of demand forecasting plus quality assurance is what allows us to deliver a reliable, high-trust experience for our users, even when the platform is under peak pressure.
Your business is data-driven, so it’s important to empower every key stakeholder with the right data at the right time and in the right format. How are different teams and departments within Urban Company benefiting from the platform? How are teams across Engineering, Operations, Finance, Customer Experience, and Vendor Management using actionable insights to boost customer satisfaction and operational efficiency?
The backbone of Urban Company is data, and the platform plays a central role in how we operationalize it. We use it to build and manage metrics at every level of granularity across the organization — whether that’s country, city, city × category, or even hub-level data. These become the core ‘needles’ that guide how the business is run.
Every action on our platform — from a customer booking to a professional completing a service — generates a relevant data point. With this platform, we can synthesize all of that into actionable insights at the platform level. This means every team, whether it’s operations, marketing, product, or partner management, has a single source of truth and can act on real-time, reliable data. For example, operations can see demand–supply dynamics at a micro level, marketing can build sharper customer cohorts, and partner teams can spot performance or training needs early.
Can you share with us the business and technology benefits the company is getting in terms of cost savings, time-to- value, real-time insights, newer innovations?
On the tech side, its powerful query engine and data lake capabilities allow our teams to move much faster — instead of worrying about infrastructure, we can stay focused on solving real-world business problems. That speed translates directly into time-to-value, with teams able to experiment, iterate, and deploy new use cases far more quickly than before.
