Accommodation listing site Grabhouse.com raises seed funding from India Quotient, Deutsche Bank exec

Mumbai-based Cryptopy Technologies Pvt Ltd, the company behind the real estate portal Grabhouse.com, has raised an undisclosed amount in seed funding from early-stage investment firm India Quotient and MV Krishnan, vice president (corporate treasury sales) at Deutsche Bank. The capital will be used to develop more features and expand to Pune.

The company was founded by Prateek Shukla (CEO) and Pankhuri Shrivastava (CMO), and the site was launched last year. Shukla is an IIT Kanpur alumnus and had earlier worked as marketing head at Techkriti and Cenogen Materials. Pankhuri holds an engineering degree in computer science from Rajiv Gandhi Technological University (Bhopal).

Grabhouse is a free of brokerage site that helps people find compatible roommates and rented accommodation. It aims to connect owners or current tenants to prospective tenants directly. It is a do-it-yourself platform to help people bypass brokers, without paying brokerage fee.

The firm also offers an Android app to list property directly on the website and keep a track of interested people. It lets one take a compatibility test with prospective roommates and leverages information shared on social media.

The firm claims that currently it has profiles of more than 1,100 room seekers and 500 houses on its portal. According to Shukla, the site gets more than 25 listings and 32 profiles every day, with around 500-600 page views.

Indian online real estate space is a highly tapped market with multiple players operating. The key players in this space are Housing.com, CommonFloor.com, 99acres.com, IndiaProperty.com and Magicbricks.com and many of these players have a huge presence in Mumbai. Housing, a new comer, has already raised multiple rounds of funding from investors, including Nexus Venture Partners. So in the long run, Grabhouse.com may find it difficult to compete with these companies.

(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)