Accommodation listing site Grabhouse.com raises $2.5M in Series A funding from Kalaari & Sequoia

Mumbai-based Cryptopy Technologies Pvt Ltd, the company behind real estate portal Grabhouse.com, has raised $2.5 million in its Series A round of funding from Kalaari Capital and Sequoia Capital, according to a top executive of the company.

The investment will be used for product development and increasing the company's footprint across major cities in India.

"The problem of finding the right rental property or PG still happens to be an arduous task for the seeker and Grabhouse has created a proprietary matching technology to efficiently solve this problem for the consumer," said GV Ravishankar, MD, Sequoia Capital India Advisors.

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. The company claims to have over 53,000 broker free houses listed on its platform, and is adding over 350 houses and 250 seeker profiles daily.

In July 2014, the company had raised $500,000 in pre-Series A funding from India Quotient. Prior to that, it had raised an undisclosed amount in seed funding from India Quotient and MV Krishnan of Deutsche Bank. It had earlier also secured an undisclosed amount from RB Partners' Chetan Bohra and Navin Ranka.

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

(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)