First ever funding by a Korean investor in India
December 19th, 2016: As an extension to the Series B funding, NoBroker.com has raised $7 million ( INR 50 crores). This extension round is led by Korean investor KTB Network. This is the extension of $10 mn Series-B round announced few months back this year, taking cumulative Series-B round to $17 mn. With $3 mn in Series-A funding early last year, this takes the total funding raised by NoBroker.com to $20 million from its inception.
This funding round was led by KTB Network and existing investors- SAIF Partners, BEENEXT & Digital Garage also participated in the funding.
“I am impressed with the differentiated and disruptive business model of NoBroker, which is solving a huge latent customer demand. NoBroker has already served millions of rent seekers and home owners to find one another, seamlessly through its platform, since its inception in 2013. I am constantly impressed by the customer-centricity at NoBroker and have no doubt that it will continue to champion its customers need. With a large and growing Indian population, NoBroker has the potential to become market leader in this large real estate market” said Chunsoo Kim, Venture Capitalist at KTB Network.
Amit Agarwal, CEO & Co- Founder, NoBroker.com, said “This is special because this is the first time that a Korean fund has led the funding round for an Indian startup. Their Korean start up experiences will help us further with innovative ideas so that we can continue to grow exponentially. We are at an excellent position now in terms of customer growth and financials. Global network of KTB will also aid us in our future global ambitions.”
NoBroker.com has seen a steady growth curve this year. Though the real estate sector saw a series of and ups and downs this year complete with many mergers and acquisitions. NoBroker registered sustained growth matrix. The year started with NoBroker.com raising $10 million in Series B funding. The last couple of months saw entrepreneurial stalwarts like Anand Chandrasekaran and Vijay Shekhar Sharma also investing undisclosed amounts in NoBroker.com. "We are glad to have KTB as our investor. These additional funds have put us in a strong position from overall capital perspective. Our aim is to use these funds to expand rapidly and move towards becoming the number one online real estate player in India in terms of closed transactions in next 24 months" says Akhil Gupta , CTO & Co- Founder, NoBroker.com.
NoBroker has served 1.5 million customers till date, making it the world’s largest C2C real estate platform. NoBroker is adding more than 1 lakh new registered customers on a monthly basis now and witnessing 5 lakh customer connections every month which results in a saving of more than 20 crores of brokerage monthly. NoBroker.com recently moved to a freemium subscription-fee based model and has been growing revenues aggressively. Unlike many other ‘east-copy-west’ businesses, it’s a built-for-India business model with no direct comparison with any other large online real estate player worldwide. This is the first time that customers are paying upfront platform-usage fees in real estate since they can clearly see 80-90% savings in their transaction cost.
There is a huge customer demand and acceptance of a brokerage-free real estate marketplace. In fact, the market size of residential rental and resale brokerage alone in top 20 cities in India is a whopping $6.5 billion which is estimated to grow to $17 billion over the next 5 years.
The problem that NoBroker.com is trying to solve has massive scale and impact since home effects almost everybody’s life. Before NoBroker.com, a typical rental transaction would cost 2 months brokerage and a resale transaction used to cost buyers & sellers a combined 4 to 6 per cent of the deal value as brokerage. NoBroker has managed to crash this transaction cost and put the savings back in customer’s pocket.
Not just rentals, but NoBroker.com is the first and only online real estate firm in India to offer brokerage-free Buying/Selling of properties. With such disruptive moves in an age-old industry, NoBroker.com is attempting to transform the way real estate transactions take place by doing what has never been done before.
Akhil Gupta is the Co-Founder & CTO of NoBroker.com. He founded NoBroker.com because he believed that paying hefty brokerage cannot be the only option to find a new home. He is techie to the core and believes that a tech based platform like NoBroker.com can revolutionize house hunting experience for customers.
Prior to founding NoBroker.com, Akhil has spent almost a decade developing and managing software development team at Oracle & stratup. His passion of technology and pursuit for solutions helped in filing couple of patents. Other than software development Akhil has experience in product design and rolling out products for global audience and has conducted trainings for sales team at Oracle.
During his stay at IIT Bombay, Akhil was General Secretary of his hostel. As head of the hostel council he was responsible for the welfare of 450 students. Akhil did his final year project with Honeywell and UCSB and filed a research page with coveted research journal on his finding on pulp digester functioning.
Akhil has a dual degree (B-Tech + M-tech) from IIT-Bombay. He believes in creating exceptions in whatever he does and wants to be a source inspiration for others.
Amit Kumar Agarwal is the Co-Founder & CEO of NoBroker.com. Amit founded NoBroker.com to revolutionize house hunting not just by eliminating brokerage but by making it convenient and hassle-free with the use of cutting edge technology and innovation.
He looks after overall vision and direction for the company. Out of 13 years of his total work experience, he spent 8 years in management consulting division of PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) in their Banking and Financial services vertical. In this period, he consulted top Indian and foreign banks for formulating their business strategy (entry & portfolio strategy) and enhanced their on-ground profitability (through large-scale pan-India implementation, impacting hundreds of branches). He led consulting teams, worked directly with CXOs , and won many accolades. This led him to head the strategy function in ANZ Bank reporting to India CEO. Here, he formulated India strategy and was instrumental in getting the bank, the very coveted two additional India branch licenses from RBI. Having won badminton championship in school, his passion is to play squash.
Amit is an alumnus from IIT-Kanpur and IIM- Ahmedabad.