Online marketplace for shared accommodation Nestaway raises $1.3M from IDG, others

Bangalore-based startup Nestaway Technologies Pvt Ltd, which runs a managed online marketplace for shared accommodation for singles under Nestaway, has raised about Rs 8 crore ($1.25 million) from IDG Ventures besides a string of angel investors including InMobi founder Naveen Tewari, as per a report in The Economic Times, citing a company executive.

An email query to the company and the investors for more information did not immediately elicit a response.

The newspaper report said the money raised will be used by the two-month old startup to launch operations in the Delhi National Capital Region and Pune.

Nestaway seeks to turn houses available for renting into fully-furnished and managed apartments and provide them to pre-verified tenants.

In effect it seeks to target singles, either working professionals or students, who already opt for such shared accommodation through an unorganised channel to share costs of rentals, especially in large cities.

For the property owner it gets involved with tenant sourcing, rent collection, maintenance of the house and even manages tenant move-out. The startup also offers free minor repairs and charges no separate brokerage for the property owner and claims its business model of targeting singles, generates 20-30 per cent higher rental income for the landlord/landlady.

Nestaway was founded by NIT Suratkal alumni Amarendra Sahu, Jitendra Jagadev, Smruti Parida and Deepak Dhar.

Sahu, a BTech in computer science who went on to do MBA from IIM Bangalore, had earlier co-founded television technology startup BrizzTV along with Jagadev. He had spent five years across Cisco, Juniper and Lucent in data networking and wireless.

His previous venture BrizzTV, a media-tech startup that brings web content onto the television screen without internet connectivity, is backed by Ojas Venture Partners.

(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)