Angel funded Apartment Adda launches an app to move towards private social networking
Apartment Adda is a private portal for apartment residents -- an online housing society accounting and management software that was founded by Venkat Kandaswamy and Sangeeta Banerjee in 2008. Appartment Adda is currently a team of 24 spread across 4 cities.Based out of Bangalore, the company is growing steadily and has raised its first angel round after five years from the likes of Sharad Sharma (Co-founder and Governing Council Member of iSPIRT Foundation), Bhupen Shah and Raghu Tarra of Sling Media, Nasscom products and iSPIRT, Tushar Patel of a global investment banking firm and Zaheer Rattonsey of Real Estate and Film Production.
Three thousand and five hundred apartment complexes across 70 Indian cities have their ADDA and use the online billing application. A total of Rs.45 crore of maintenance invoices are raised every quarter by various residents’ associations.
Now, the company has come up with a technology update and is moving closer towards a private social network. This change, Sangeeta believes is very important in the Indian startup scene as there is hardly any other portal in the world that has got these two pieces together:
1) A robust online ERP for managing residential complexes with payment gateway and complete end-to-end accounting.
2) A private social networking platform for neighbours.
“In the last few years, we were heavily focussed on building the most robust and functional online ERP for residential complexes. That is what has helped us crack the tough Mumbai Societies market. Now, we are ready with a focus on the social networking aspect which was ignored earlier,” says Sangeeta. The new dashboard for residents now looks like a social network and has an uplifted UI and experience. Some features include:
- Important Information – like ‘dues’ or actionable buttons are clearly displayed at the very top of the page
- In an ADDA, members talk to the community, talk within their mini-adda aka subgroups, ask for opinions, share photos
- New Feed Layout
More about the update can be read on the Apartment Adda blog.
The real estate market has been really hot in the last year with some big announcements -- Housing.com's quick growth, CommonFloor acquiring Flat.to, the tussle between the biggies, MagicBricks, 99 acres and the many new startups cropping up in the space. Apartment Adda plays in a complimentary space and has more than 2 lakh active users across 400 ADDAs as of now. Most of these users are HNIs and the new product has seen good adoption. “Today, we pull way ahead of other global providers in this space such as, NextDoor (Social Networking only), MyStrata (ERP only), etc,” says Sangeeta.
Website: Apartment Adda