OpenAI Is Powering Vahan’s Bold AI Push to Transform Blue-Collar Hiring in India
Vahan uses AI-powered technology to connect job seekers with employers directly through WhatsApp, streamlining the recruitment process with automated matching and communication.
In India’s booming gig economy, access—not just to opportunity, but to information—can make the difference between employment and uncertainty. That’s where Vahan.ai, a Bengaluru-based startup founded by Madhav Krishna, is rewriting the rules of recruitment. Now, with deep technical collaboration from OpenAI, it’s scaling that vision across the country.
Vahan has already helped over 1 million blue-collar workers find jobs and currently facilitates 40,000 new hires every month. But the real breakthrough? An AI recruiter that lives on WhatsApp, speaks Hindi, English, and soon eight more Indian languages—and can hold real-time voice conversations with job seekers in their local dialects.
“A simple word like yes can be said in 20 different ways across India,” Krishna told The Indian Express. “Our challenge is helping the bot understand those variations. That’s what we’re working on with OpenAI.”
Why OpenAI Matters
The AI recruiter is powered by GPT-4 and GPT-4o, and fine-tuned using a steady stream of 20,000+ daily voice calls. OpenAI’s role isn’t surface-level. Vahan is working with them at the pre-training level, modifying models to capture linguistic nuance, regional pronunciation, and conversational tonality across India’s incredibly diverse language landscape.
“We spent a lot of time trying to make the voice sound very desi and not robotic,” Krishna said.
From verifying documents to scheduling interviews, the recruiter now handles most frontline tasks with minimal human intervention. Early results? A 3x productivity boost for human recruiters using Vahan’s system, with the potential to reach 20x.
From Skills to Jobs, Vitamins to Painkillers
Vahan didn’t start here. The company’s original product helped users learn English. But as Krishna noted, that was a vitamin—what users really needed was a painkiller: a job.
Accepted into Y Combinator and backed by Khosla Ventures, Vahan pivoted to building a recruitment marketplace connecting employers like Zomato, Swiggy, and Flipkart with job-seekers via local recruitment agencies. Vahan’s app lets these agencies upload candidate profiles, match them to jobs, and validate credentials—all fed into the AI recruiter.
What’s Next
With hiring use cases validated in e-commerce and delivery, Vahan is now expanding into manufacturing, transportation, and on-demand services—anywhere blue-collar labor is in demand. The company earns revenue from employers for every successful hire.
Still, Krishna is clear: AI won’t replace humans in India’s job market—it will amplify them.
“In India, people still look for jobs through their bhaiya or chacha,” he said. “Our tech connects those local networks to real opportunities. That’s where AI shines.”
In a world saturated with AI hype, Vahan and OpenAI are showing what real-world, culturally grounded innovation actually looks like.
Read more on The Indian Express
Listen to Madhav Krishna with Shafiq Khartabil on the Venture Everywhere podcast: Hire Calling. Now on Apple & Spotify and check out to all our past episodes here!
