How a dinner-party referral turned an Indian concierge desk into a global virtual assistant service

Who built it, and what they built

Sunder P is the founder and CEO of GetFriday, a virtual assistance company based in Bangalore, India, that supports busy individuals and small businesses around the world. The business panel for the story lists 150 employees and one cofounder.

The wider company runs several lines of business, including a concierge service for expat Indians, an immigration services division, and a real estate venture, but GetFriday is the arm he describes as genuinely global, with clients spread across more than 40 countries and 4 time zones.

Where the idea came from

Sunder trained as an engineer, added an MBA, and was working as a project management resource when the dotcom boom arrived. With friends in India and the US, he built Bharatmail, a hybrid email-to-post and post-to-email service that let Indian students in the US exchange messages with parents back home in a week or two instead of a month or more.

Word of mouth pushed Bharatmail to close to half a million expat Indian users within a year, with roughly 5000 physical letters a week processed from a rented house in Chennai. The team raised seed funding within a month in 1999, but when the dotcom bust cut off funding, the startup was merged into a larger organization tied to the TTK Group.

After the merger, the team pivoted toward a broader concierge offering and launched YourManInIndia in 2004, handling a wide range of tasks in India for expat clients. That service drew international press attention and set the stage for what came next.