The Economic Times
Author : PEERZADA ABRAR
Location : BANGALORE
Article Date : 06/19/2014
2-year-old co valued . 300 crore with at ` Helion & Qualcomm Ventures pitching in listings portal Housing .com has raised a new round of funding that has boosted its valuation and turned the spotlight on rising investor in companies that deliver services on the internet.
The Mumbai-based company has received `. 115 crore in a deal led by Helion Venture Partners and Qualcomm Ventures, the venture capital arm of mobile phone chips maker. Existing investor Nexus Venture Partners also participated in the round which has valued the two-year old company crore.
at about ` “The investors bought into this idea, they are excited about the next few years for the company,“ said Advitiya Sharma, the 24-yearold co-founder of Housing.com which was set up by a group of 12 graduates from IIT Bombay.
Housing.com which has now raised a total of about `. 138 crore in four rounds of funding expects to use the money to hire talent, build technology and for increasing its branding and marketing activities. Few months back, the firm used to list 200 houses per day which has increased to over 2000 houses per day. Sharma expects to map one crore houses on his portal over the next two years.
Investors have been bullish about the online property listing business. Bangalore-based CommonFloor received ` . 64 crore of fresh funding earlier this year from investors including Accel Partners and Tiger Global.
“As investors, our goal is to support brilliant founders pursuing audacious ideas,“ said Suvir Sujan co-founder of Nexus.
Housing.com has established a first of its kind data science laboratory for the real estate industry that helps it mine and analyse data on a constant.
It has mapped over 80,000 houses in Mumbai and some 50,000 houses in Bangalore which constitutes over 5% of the total houses in both cities.
They are also using drones (unmanned aerial vehicles) to collect this data which includes aerial surveys and photographs. Sharma and his friends up the company when they could not find a suitable house in Mumbai after graduating from IIT Bombay.
Retail entrepreneur Zishaan Hayath led the first round funding for the company in 2012, followed by funding from businessman Haresh Chawla, Nexus came in as a venture investor. This year 34 venture capital deals worth $131 million (. `788 crore) were struck till date in information and services compared to 111 deals worth $231 million (. `1,389 crore) signed last year, according to research firm Venture Intelligence.
