Bengaluru-based NoBroker Technologies Solutions Pvt. Ltd, which runs a peer-to-peer (P2P) property listing portal for renting homes NoBroker.com, has raised an undisclosed amount of investment from Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma.
The investment will help NoBroker.com in its next phase of growth and customer acquisition, the company said in a statement.
"He (Vijay) is a visionary and has built a ground-breaking business. Suggestions from him will help us realise our goal of being a market leader in India," said Akhil Gupta, chief technology officer and co-founder of NoBroker Technologies.
In September, Facebook director Anand Chandrasekaran also invested in NoBroker.com.
The company, which raised its Series B funding in February this year, has raised nearly $13 million in funding so far. Other investors in the firm include SAIF Partners, Singapore-based venture capital firm BEENEXT, Digital Garage (an early investor in Twitter), BEENOS, Qualgro and Mamoru Taniya of Asuka holdings.
NoBroker was founded in 2013 by IIT alumni Gupta, Amit Agarwal and Saurabh Garg. Gupta was an application engineer at Oracle and technical lead at PeopleFluent, which provides Software-as-a-Service talent management solutions. Agarwal was an analyst with Cognizant, principal consultant at PwC and associate director at Australia and New Zealand Banking Group, while Garg is co-founder of Four Fountains De-stress Spa.
NoBroker is a home rental platform that helps users find homes without paying any brokerage. It claims to have verified listings to make sure that those who are renting out homes are direct owners or shared accommodation parties and that there are no middlemen or brokers involved.
The firm also provides users with a template to generate their own customised legal document for each rental. NoBroker claims to have served 1.5 million customers to date. The platform claims to be enabling about 500,000 customer connections on a monthly basis across Mumbai, Bengaluru, Pune and Chennai.
NoBroker recently moved to a freemium subscription-fee based model.
The market size of residential rental and resale brokerage in top 20 cities in India is a $6.5 billion. The segment is estimated to grow to $17 billion in five years, according to NoBroker.com.
Several online platforms for brokerage-free rental listing including Grabhouse.com, Zocalo.in and Nestaway Technologies have attracted investor attention in the last one year.
The digital real estate segment in India is dominated by companies such as MagicBricks, 99acres. Housing, PropTiger and QuikrHomes. News Corp, which holds a significant stake in PropTiger, also owns Mosaic Media Ventures, the parent of this website.
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