Tiger Global leads $50 mn Series D in real estate platform NoBroker

Bengaluru-based NoBroker Technologies Solutions, which owns and runs an eponymous property-listing portal, has raised $50 million in a Series D funding round led by New York headquartered alternative investments firm Tiger Global Management. The round brings NoBroker’s total funding so far to $121 million.

Existing investor General Atlantic participated in the round.

The fresh investment round comes about four months after the company raised $51 million in a Series C round led by US-based private equity firm General Atlantic.

NoBroker is an integrated platform that offers solutions for real estate transactions, including rental, sale or purchase of properties. Its home store service provides value added services like loan, packers and movers, legal documentation, and online rent payment.

The company was founded in 2013 by Indian Institute of Technology alumni Amit Kumar Agarwal, Akhil Gupta and Saurabh Garg. 

Agarwal was previously an analyst at Cognizant Technologies, principal consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and associate director at Australia New Zealand Bank. Gupta was an application engineer at Oracle. Garg co-founded Four Fountains De-Stress Spa, a chain of scientific health spas. He has also worked with the Hindustan Unilever and myDaily Meal in the past.

“NoBroker Team has built a tech-driven C2C business to make residential and commercial real estate transactions convenient and affordable. We have been extremely impressed by the strength of the NoBroker team and their relentless focus on using technology to solve end-to end transactions in the large real estate market in India,” Scott Shleifer, partner, Tiger Global Management said.

According to the company, more than 30 lakh properties are registered on the platform and over 70 lakh individuals have used NoBroker services.

NoBroker recently launched its operations in Hyderabad in August 2019 and currently operates across six cities such as Mumbai, Bangalore, Pune, Chennai, Hyderabad and Gurgaon.

“NoBroker is augmenting customer experience in the real estate industry with the help of technology. We are using machine learning and artificial intelligence to make transactions faster and low cost for the end user. We are also bringing technology to financial transactions involved in real estate,” Gupta said.

NoBroker competes with well-funded firms such as QuikrHomes, MagicBricks and PropTiger.

News Corp, the main investor in the company that operates PropTiger, also owns the company that publishes TechCircle.

Recent deals in realty-tech

September 2019: Real estate brokerage portal Square Yards, backed by Anil Ambani-led Reliance Group, raised $20 million from a group of investors including media house Bennett Coleman & Co Limited (BCCL) and Japanese real estate investment company Genkai Capital. 

September 2019: Online property rental platform NestAway raised around $5 million from existing investor Goldman Sachs. 

A managed home rental network of over 20,000 homes, NestAway claims to be serving over 39,600 tenants across Bengaluru, Mumbai, Delhi, Pune, Hyderabad, Noida, Greater Noida, Gurugram, Ghaziabad and Faridabad. 

It had raised $10 million in a round co-led by existing investors Tiger Global Management and Chiratae Ventures in May this year..

May 2019: Bengaluru-based startup Zaasna Proptech raised seed funding worth around $290,000 from global investors in Singapore, West Asia and the US. Zaasna offers a platform for home buyers where they can search all listed properties, select the property and house, schedule a site visit, make payments online, digitally sign documents and apply for a home loan.

March 2019: Property Share, an online real estate investment platform that enables fractional ownership of property, raised Series A funding round led by venture capital firm Lightspeed Venture Partners.

October 2018:  Online classifieds platform Quikr acquired the Chennai-based operator of IndiaProperty.com to grow its real estate vertical.