Real estate portal Housing co-founder Advitiya Sharma on offering services along the lines of Zillow in India

In an exclusive interview with Techcircle, Advitiya Sharma, co-founder of real estate portal Housing, explains how the firm is building the business on the lines of Zillow, a NASDAQ-listed online real estate database that was created and founded in 2005 by Rich Barton and Lloyd Frink, former Microsoft executives and founders of Microsoft spin-off Expedia.

It is targeting 2,500 brokers to do business within a year. Sharma said the firm will spend about $2.5 million to build a data science lab and hire more IIT graduates to double its technology team. In June this year, the firm secured $2.5 million in pre-Series A funding from Nexus Venture Partners. It also received two rounds of angel funding from various investors, including Haresh Chawla, former Network18 CEO, and Zishaan Hayath, co-founder of the phone commerce company Chaupaati Bazaar, which was acquired by Kishore Biyani's Future Group a couple of years ago.