Pronto, the emerging consumer platform co-founded by Anjali Sardana, has successfully raised $2,000,000 in a seed round led by Bain Capital Ventures. This fresh infusion of capital sets the stage for Pronto to scale its unique model - designed to radically improve how people discover and experience local services, from salons to personal trainers to massage therapists.

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Reimagining Local Discovery

Pronto is tackling a fragmented yet massive market: local services. Despite the dominance of platforms like Yelp or Google, most consumers still find booking a reliable service provider to be frustrating and opaque.

Pronto flips this model. Instead of endless browsing, consumers use Pronto to instantly book curated, pre-vetted local experiences - all with full transparency in pricing, availability, and customer satisfaction. For the service providers, Pronto becomes an intelligent demand channel that automates bookings and surfaces their services to high-intent users.

It's a win-win in an industry where trust and immediacy are paramount.

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What the Funding Means for Pronto

With the new $2M raise, Sardana and her team are focused on:

• Expanding into new metropolitan areas across the U.S.
  
• Building deeper integrations with provider scheduling systems
  
• Enhancing AI-driven matching between users and services
  
• Investing in brand storytelling and influencer marketing
  

Sardana, a second-time founder and product veteran, emphasized the importance of using capital wisely: "This round isn’t about vanity growth. It’s about building trust at scale."

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Strategic Foundations for Scale

While Pronto may appear like another marketplace play, its architecture is different:

• End-to-end experience ownership: from discovery to payment to feedback
  
• Vertical-specific UX for each service category
  
• Dynamic capacity optimization for providers
  

And perhaps most importantly, the team is laser-focused on retention loops: incentives and reminders built directly into the product that keep users coming back without relying solely on paid marketing.

This embedded growth design positions Pronto to scale organically over time, especially in tier-one cities where consumer churn is a major pain point for traditional platforms.

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Founders, Take Note: Your First 100 Providers Matter More Than Your First 1,000 Users

A key insight Pronto has leveraged is prioritizing provider onboarding experience with surgical precision. The product team didn’t start by trying to flood the platform with users - they started by building deep, valuable tools for providers: instant scheduling syncs, seamless payout flows, auto-generated promotional assets, and high-converting profiles.

In founder terms, they built "supply trust" before "demand scale."

And the result? Providers became Pronto’s most powerful evangelists. When your supply-side is winning, the demand-side starts to follow organically.

Founders in marketplace or network-effect businesses should internalize this: if your early supply base feels unsupported, undervalued, or out of sync with the product’s goals, you’ll burn through them before the flywheel even starts.

One tactic Sardana’s team used that proved wildly effective: co-creating onboarding milestones with providers themselves. Instead of prescribing a one-size-fits-all onboarding journey, they mapped workflows around how their top-tier service partners already operated. That led to higher activation rates and lower time-to-first-booking. The takeaway? Don’t optimize onboarding around what your product can do - optimize it around what your best partners already do well. Then meet them there.

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Local Services Market: Growth and Opportunity

The local services sector is worth over $800 billion in the U.S. alone, according to IBISWorld. Yet it remains digitally under-optimized.

Recent data shows:

• 71% of consumers prefer to book local services online, but only 37% of small service providers offer real-time booking.
  
• Service discovery via mobile apps has grown 130% year-over-year since 2020.
  
• Personalized experience platforms (like ClassPass, Mindbody, and now Pronto) are seeing higher LTVs and lower CACs compared to traditional listing platforms.
  

This fragmentation + digitization lag = prime territory for startups that can offer a clean, efficient, and reliable user experience.

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About Anjali Sardana

Anjali Sardana brings a rare combination of consumer insight, product thinking, and executional rigor. Before founding Pronto, she was instrumental in scaling multiple early-stage tech startups, with roles spanning from Head of Product to VP of Strategy. Her experience shaping product-market fit in zero-to-one environments is now proving invaluable as Pronto hits early traction milestones.

Her thesis for Pronto? Local experiences are the new luxury - and the startup that removes the friction from trying them is poised to own the consumer wallet.

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What’s Next for Pronto

With a strong seed round in place and support from one of the most respected VC firms in the world, Pronto plans to:

• Launch in 5 additional cities over the next 6 months
  
• Double its provider network with a focus on quality and diversity
  
• Roll out a premium user membership with exclusive perks
  
• Deepen its analytics offering for providers to understand customer behavior
  

As the platform continues to bridge the gap between convenience and trust, it could soon become the default interface for discovering and enjoying local life.