Tiger Global leads $10.4M in Series D funding in real estate portal CommonFloor.com

Bangalore-based maxHeap Technologies Pvt Ltd, which owns real estate and apartment management portal CommonFloor.com, has secured Rs 64 crore ($10.4 million) in Series D round of funding from existing investors Tiger Global Management and Accel Partners. The capital will be used for product development, building on its research expertise in the real estate domain and also to fuel growth through new marketing initiatives, the company said in a statement.

"We have seen phenomenal growth over the past two years, and the size of our community has grown manifold. The top-line has continued to grow by over 100 per cent quarter on quarter since last year," said Sumit Jain, co- founder and CEO, CommonFloor.

The company claims that it has over 75,000 projects listed on its portal, and has nearly 0.2 million active listings, currently. The firm said it has hired top talent from some of the best internet companies worldwide, and is also filling its ranks with graduates from top engineering and management colleges in India like the IITs, IIMs and ISB.

It recently launched its mobile app for iOS which offers innovative features like map search and augmented search. CommonFloor has also recently expanded its geographic footprint to Jaipur, Chandigarh, Lucknow, Nagpur, Indore, Ahmedabad, Kochi, Coimbatore, Mysore, Kolkata and Mangalore, taking the number of cities it is present to 18. It already has offices in Bangalore, Mumbai, Noida, Gurgaon, Chennai, Hyderabad and Pune.

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. In July last year, the company had raised $7.5 million in Series C round from the same investors. In an interview, Jain had said that the firm is open for more funding as it needed money to grow. In October 2012, it had raised an undisclosed amount in Series B from the same investors. It had raised Series A funding from Accel Partners around four years ago.

(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)