Accommodation listing site Grabhouse.com raises $500K in pre-Series A funding from India Quotient

Mumbai-based Cryptopy Technologies Pvt Ltd, the company behind real estate portal Grabhouse.com, has raised $500,000 from its existing investor India Quotient, a top executive of the company informed Techcircle.in.

"The capital will be used to market the portal using search engine marketing (SEM) in order to enable more listings on the platform and also attract more home seekers," said Pankhuri Shrivastava, co-founder and CMO, Grabhouse.

Grabhouse is essentially a brokerage free site that helps people find compatible roommates and rented accommodations. A do-it-yourself platform, it aims to connect owners or current tenants to prospective tenants directly in order to bypass brokers. Presently, the company claims to have 53,000 broker free houses listed on its platform, and is adding over 350 houses and 250 seeker profiles on a daily basis.

Earlier this year, it had raised an undisclosed amount in seed funding from India Quotient and MV Krishnan of Deutsche Bank. Prior to that, it had secured funding from RB Partners' Chetan Bohra and Navin Ranka.

The company was founded by Prateek Shukla (CEO) and Pankhuri in 2013. 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.

Apart from the portal, the firm also offers an Android app to enable owners to list their properties directly on the website and keep track of interested people. It also lets one take a compatibility test with prospective roommates and leverages information shared on social media for the same. The service is already operational in four cities—Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad and Bangalore.

Grabhouse was one of the 10 companies incubated at IQ boot camp and was also selected for GSF accelerator programme.

Indian online real estate space in India is crowded with a number of players already operational including Housing.com, CommonFloor.com, 99acres.com, IndiaProperty.com and Magicbricks.com. Recently, Housing.com had secured $19 million in funding from Helion, Nexus and Qualcomm Ventures.

Recently, India Quotient, along with other investors had invested in Roposo, a fashion-focused social network. It had also earlier made investment in companies like Dogspot.in and Vellvette.com, among others.

(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)