Online real estate marketplace HeyPillow raises $3M

HeyPillow Technology Pvt Ltd that recently floated an online real estate marketplace under the brand of HeyPillow, said on Thursday it has secured $3 million (about Rs19 crore) in a Series A round of funding from Hampton Capital.

HeyPillow was founded in 2014 by San Francisco-based Stan Dong, formerly a research scientist at Stanford University in California, along with an unnamed Indian friend. The firm declined to name the other co-founder but as per RoC filings, it counts public-listed realtor Nitesh Estates' founder and managing director Nitesh Shetty as a director.

Shetty is also associated with an investment firm named Hampton Investments Pvt Ltd.

HeyPillow did not share details about investor Hampton Capital but said it is a public market investor (with certain private investments) based out of Singapore and India.

The real estate startup is looking to use the fresh capital for organic growth, which includes adding new features on the website, ramping up its marketing team and promotional activities.

Apart from being a platform for residential and commercial properties, HeyPillow is also a marketplace for home loans, even as it provides tools such as mortgage calculators and real estate market trends.

It also offers value-added services such as personalised dashboards for buyers, sellers, renters, brokers, developers and property owners with provisions for profiles, ratings and reviews.

Besides, HeyPillow is moving into the home design market, collaborating with interior designers to provide remodelling and design ideas to users, the company said in the statement.

HeyPillow had launched its operations in India about a month-and-a-half ago. It is now looking to expand to the APAC region and the Middle East.

"We don't just list residential and commercial properties, but are also a marketplace for home loans and mortgages. HeyPillow also provides tools like mortgage calculators, and useful guides on real-estate purchase and market trend analysis," Dong said in a statement.

It claims to have a catalogue of over 15,000 commercial and residential listings across Bangalore, Pune, Mumbai and Delhi-NCR. As of now, it is available on Google Play, with an iOS app set to go live shortly.

The startup is entering India's intensely competitive online real-estate space at a time when there is already a bloodbath among the existing players. Several once-high-flying real-estate startups are now considering mergers, at the behest of their investors.

While IndiaProperty.com is inching closer to combining with IndiaHomes.com, as a precursor to convincing existing and new investors to fund another round of capital infusion, another online classifieds listing firm Quikr India Pvt Ltd is in talks to acquire realty portal CommonFloor.com.

There are many other firms in the business such as Times Group-owned magicbricks.com, Info Edge's subsidiary 99acres.com and PropTiger.com. News Corp, which picked a 30 per cent stake in PropTiger.com, owns the parent of this news website.