Ratan Tata backs home rental marketplace Nestaway

Tata Sons' chairman emeritus Ratan Tata has invested an undisclosed amount in Bangalore-based Nestaway Technologies Pvt Ltd, a startup that runs a managed home rental marketplace by the same name.

"It is an honour to have Tata…as an investor in the company and look forward to his guidance and support to help with the next phase of growth," said Karthik Prabhakar, vice president of IDG Ventures India, an early investor in Nestaway.

In July last year, Nestaway raised Rs 76 crore (approximately $12 million) in funding from consumer e-commerce venture Flipkart and its investor Tiger Global.

Nestaway was founded by Amarendra Sahu, Smruti Parida, Deepak Dhar and Jitendra Jagadev in January 2015. It turns 'for-rent' apartments into managed, fully-furnished houses and provided them to pre-verified tenants. NestAway, which till recently counted single working professionals as its target audience, has now forayed into the family segment.

Nestaway competes with Zocalo's CoHo Stayz, a tech platform that offers managed apartments and villas in the Delhi NCR region for long stays. In August, Zocalo had raised an undisclosed amount in seed funding from startup accelerator GSF's Rajesh Sawhney, MakeMyTrip co-founder Sachin Bhatia and others.

The Nestaway deal is the ninth confirmed investment in 2016 for Tata, one of India's most active angel investors last year. In 2016, Tata put money in retail technology startup SnapBizz, tea e-tailer Tea Box, coupons site CashKaro, baby products e-commerce site FirstCry, startup analytics firm Tracxn, animal lovers' portal DogSpot, Invictus Oncology and B2B marketplace Moglix. He has backed about 30 startups since retiring as Tata Sons' chief in 2012.

Techcircle.in had recently reported that Tata is close to backing mobile advertising platform InMobi.

The Indian online realty market is dominated by Info Edge's 99acres and Times group-owned MagicBricks. PropTiger, CommonFloor (acquired by Quikr), Housing.com and IndiaProperty are among the other major players.

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