With third acquisition this year, home décor platform Livspace plans to consolidate the space
Bengaluru-based Livspace, an end-to-end home design and décor platform for homeowners and designers, announced on Thursday that it has acquired YoFloor, a mobile platform that offers a virtual trial room for home design decisions.
The terms of the transaction remain undisclosed.
Anuj Srivastava, Shagufta Anurag and Ramakant Sharma founded Livspace in 2012. The platform allows customers to discover a variety of interior designs for all types of rooms, personalise the design – by colour, material, style – and get the exact look for their homes within a few weeks.
The founders says they are a design and technology-first team, employing a combination of data science, algorithms, and industrial design to create unique experiences for homeowners and scale the job of interior designers.
The reason for this acquisition is the challenge Livspace faced in interacting with customers. If a homeowner chose this startup to help design their house, they would collect clippings from the internet or interior design magazines and produce them to the designer. The designer then tries to finalise on the design after a lot of back and forth with the customer.
YoFloor is a mobile and virtual reality platform that helps homeowners visualise their designs and arrive at their own custom styles. The startup is not very old: it was founded by Ankur Mishra and Archit Rathi in March 2015.
Using YoFloor, Livspace can offer a WYSIWYG (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get) productivity tool that can help designers give the homeowner an immersive design experience in real time. This eliminates the need for a lengthy exchange of design iterations and feedback.
The platform then allows designers upload home designs and layout to display various themes that the customer can choose from. Hence, deciding upon a final design will take less time, and augmented visualisation will give a highly involved overall experience.
Speaking on the acquisition, Anuj, CEO and Co-founder of Livspace said in a statement:
With our previous acquisitions we have built a thriving design community of both designers and homeowners. YoFloor shares with us the vision to let homeowners effortlessly see through 3D visualisation technologies, a prospective design for their homes, before they even make the purchase. This is central to the kind of personalisation and choice we want to give to home design enthusiasts in India.
According to a recent report by Technavio, the Indian home décor market which stood at USD 13 billion in 2010 is projected to touch USD 20 billion by 2015. The category is seeing huge scope and acceptance among consumers when it comes to digital buying. It also reported that the industry will grow at a CAGR of 50.42 per cent between the period 2014 and 2019.
This is the third company Livspace acquired this year. In March 2015, it acquired DezignUp, a design community and marketplace for consumers and design professionals. In May 2015, it acquired Dwll.in, a curated online network of interior designers. According to a previous statement, the company’s main aim is to create content and community-driven e-commerce for the home design and décor space.
Backed by Helion Ventures, Bessemer Partners, and Jungle Ventures, Livspace currently has around six lakh home enthusiasts sharing designs on the platform.
