Online real estate property and broker review platform Roofpik, which is operated by Gurgaon-based AlphaBinary Technologies Pvt. Ltd, has acquired Shoppist, which offers personalised product discovery, it said in a statement.
With this acquisition, Roofpik is planning to use Shoppist’s natural language processing (NLP)-based recommendation capabilities to create a personalised experience based on property reviews and agent ratings for its users.
“With this technology, Roofpik will be able to validate reviews and generate meaningful analytics from over 5,000 user reviews that are currently live on the platform,†it said.
Post the acquisition, Divij Goyal, an IIT Roorkee alumnus and founder of Shoppist, will join Roofpik’s board as chief marketing officer.
“There's a clear gap in the real estate space which can be addressed by offering user-generated reviews/ratings of properties and agents,†said Goyal.
Founded in 2016 by Arpit Mittal and Kanika Katoch, Roofpik is a crowd-sourced real estate property and broker review platform.
Prior to founding Roofpik, Mittal had founded Edcited, an educational technology company, which was acquired by online assessment and campus hiring platform CoCubes in 2015. CoCubes was subsequently acquired by Aon Hewitt, the global talent, retirement and health solutions business of Aon Plc.
Shoppist, which is operated by Shoppist Innovations Pvt. Ltd, was founded by Shankar Singh and Divij Goyal. It is a personalised product discovery platform and uses NLP technology to find offerings from over 100 shopping channels.
Singh was previously head of technology at online tutoring firm Vedantu while Goyal was CEO at Studentalmanac.com.
Online real estate brokerage firm PropTiger, which acquired peer Housing.com in January this year, is among Roofpik’s key competitors.
The PropTiger-Housing deal came exactly a year after Tiger Global-backed CommonFloor, one of PropTiger’s peers among the new-age digital real estate commerce startups, merged into online classifieds firm Quikr.
The deal also made the online realty segment less crowded. PropTiger itself had acquired Makaan.com, one of the earliest property listing sites in India, in April 2015.
News Corp, the parent of this website, is the key investor in PropTiger.
NEA-backed IndiaHomes, which pursued a merger with JP Morgan- and Bertelsmann-backed IndiaProperty, became defunct after those talks failed.
The early movers in the business, Info Edge’s 99acres.com and Times Group’s Magicbricks.com, have so far stayed away from the consolidation game.
Startups that have raised funding recently in the realty-tech segment include Zipgrid which provides technology and knowledge services to housing and commercial communities. It had raised $500,000 (Rs 3.25 crore) in a pre-Series A round of funding from property consultancy firm Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL) and existing investor 1Crowd, a crowdfunding platform last month.
Another online platform ZippServ, which provides risk assessment services for real estate investments, had secured Rs 2.5 crore ($390,000) from a clutch of investors last month.
Meanwhile, Gurgaon-based REXPROP or Real Estate Property Exchange—which offers inventory distribution, broker to broker listings and CRM services for property consultants, agents, brokers and developers—was acquired by a mobile-based property brokers’ network BroEx in November last year.
