Yet-to-launch home services platform Renowala gets angel funding

Renowala.com, a yet-to-launch on-demand marketplace for home improvement services, has raised an undisclosed sum in angel funding from logistics industry veteran Mohammed Maheen Kannu.

The website will go live in January with services in Hyderabad and Bangalore, Joshua Kumar, founder and CEO of Renowala, told Techcircle.in. According to Kumar, the home improvement sector in India is growing at 11 percent every year.

"By analysing the customer demography from the registrations on the site, we will decide on our next port of call," Kumar said. Renowala, run by Hyderabad-based Renowala Online Pvt Ltd, will aggregate professionals that provide interior designing, home décor, plumbing and electrical maintenance among other services.

Kumar is also the CEO of Singapore-based venture capital firm AceOne Ventures.

He has also served at international property consultant Knight Frank as head of India operations and NRI relations.

Renowala would compete with the likes of Housejoy, Fixy and Taskbob besides a host of other players. "Renowala will also complement existing players in the field besides competing them," said Kalyan Sivalenka, MD at Springforth Capital Advisors, the investment banking firm that advised Renowala.

A bunch of players in the broader local services category have secured funding from investors this year.

In October, Gurgaon-based Easyfix Handy Solutions Pvt Ltd, which operates an online aggregation platform for home maintenance and repair services under EasyFix, raised an undisclosed amount in its first round of institutional funding from Axilor Venture Capital.

In the same month, The Economic Times had reported that Amazon was in advanced stage of talks to acquire a stake in HouseJoy,a Bengaluru based startup that provides home services.

Fixy, a Mumbai-based startup that provides maintenance services on demand, had raised seed funding from members of VentureNursery, an angel-backed accelerator for startups in September. Another on-demand home services startup DoorMint raised nearly $3 million in Series A funding led by Helion Ventures and Kalaari Capital recently.

Two weeks ago, Mumbai-based domestic help provider BookMyBai.com raised around $150,000 (about Rs 1 crore) in angel funding from 50K Ventures and Vineel Nalla, CEO of NBOS Technologies and founder of 50K Ventures.

Other companies which raised funding include UrbanClap (Accel Partners and SAIF Partners), LocalOye (Tiger Global and Lightspeed), Qyk (Zishaan Hayath, co-founder, Toppr.com; Abhishek Goyal, co-founder, Tracxn.com; and Delhivery co-founder Sahil Barua), Near.in (led by Anupam Mittal, CEO of People Group and Manish Vij of Smile Vun Group), FindYahan (led by Karan Bajwa, managing director of Microsoft India), TaskBob (Orios Venture Partners & Mayfield India) and UrbanPro.com (Nirvana Venture).