Real estate portal CommonFloor secures $7.5M in Series C from Tiger Global, Accel

Bangalore-based maxHeap Technologies Pvt Ltd, which owns real estate and apartment management portal CommonFloor.com, has secured $7.5 million in Series C round of funding from existing investors Accel Partners and Tiger Global Management, a New York-based investment firm.

A major chunk of the money raised from the latest round will go towards setting up offices in multiple cities. The company is also planning to use a part of the funding for product and technology development, as well as for expansion in existing cities.

"Currently, we have operations in Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune, Mumbai and Delhi-NCR. We are now planning to open offices in cities such as Coimbatore, Ahmedabad, Kolkata, Jaipur, etc.," CommonFloor's co-founder and CEO Sumit Jain told Techcircle.in.

Founded in 2007 by Jain (CEO) and Lalit Mangal (both have degrees in Computer Science from IIT Roorkee), along with Vikas Malpani, a Computer Science graduate from Visvesvaraya Technological University in Belgaum, Karnataka, CommonFloor combines property search, apartment management and vendor management. It also facilitates interactions within an apartment community (on the 'common floor' platform) and connects people to relevant service providers.

The portal is free for end-users but the firm charges businesses for listing, marketing and advertising on its site. The fee starts at Rs 10,000 and can go up to Rs 5 lakh depending on various factors. CommonFloor claims it has more than 60,000 projects listed on the portal. The number of property listings has grown by more than 500 per cent in the past financial year and the portal currently has more than 1 lakh active listings, the company has said in a statement.

In October last year, it raised an undisclosed amount in Series B from Accel Partners and Tiger Global.

In an interview with Techcircle.in a couple of months ago, Jain said that the firm was looking to clock revenues worth $25 million in the next couple of years. At that time, the company had more than 1,000 paid customers. The firm was growing 100 per cent in revenues on a quarterly basis, he added. In March this year, CommonFloor also launched an augmented reality (AR)-based search, called CommonFloor Real Estate, for properties and apartments.

(Edited by Sanghamitra Mandal)