Paytm’s Vijay Shekhar Sharma invests in NoBroker.com
Expanding his investment base, Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Founder and CEO of Paytm, has invested an undisclosed amount in a brokerage-free property search portal NoBroker.com.
According to the release, the investment will help drive NoBroker.com in the next phase of growth and customer acquisition.
“We are excited to get Vijay as an investor. In our discussions, what he liked most in NoBroker is that it is a disruptive, scalable, and capital-efficient business," said Amit Agarwal, CEO and Co-founder of NoBroker.com.
Amit says that he aims to utilise the funding for the expansion and further growth of the platform. “Besides, we are also looking forward to our interactions with Vijay. He is a visionary and has built a ground-breaking business. Suggestions from him will surely help us realise our goal of being the market leader in India, in terms of highest successful transactions.”
Launched in March 2014, Bangalore-based NoBroker connects owners and customers directly with each other by eliminating the middlemen. The company has so far closed four rounds of funding.
In February 2015, the platform raised $3 million in its Series A funding from SAIF Partners and Fulcrum Ventures.
This February, NoBroker.com raised $10 million in a round led by Singapore-based venture capital firm BEENEXT and Digital Garage along with other investors, namely BEENOS, Qualgro, and Mamoru Taniya of Asuka holdings.
In September this year, Anand Chandrasekaran, Angel Investor and Entrepreneurial Product Leader, also invested in the platform.
NoBroker claims to serve 1.5 million customers , making it the world’s largest C2C real estate platform. The platform is adding more than one lakh new registered customers on a monthly basis now and witnessing five lakh customer connections every month, which leads to a saving of more than 20 crores of brokerage monthly.
Realty: a happening industry
According to IBEF, the Indian real-estate market is expected to touch $180 billion by 2020. The housing sector alone contributes five to six percent to the country's GDP.
There are many players who are offering solutions in the realty market — both offline and online.
In the online category, Magicbricks, 99acres, Housing, PropTiger, CommonFloor, Square Yards, Makaan, and many other players are offering selling, buying, and renting facilities.
Earlier this year, online classified major Quikr acquired realty portal CommonFloor for an undisclosed amount.
Last August, Housing acquired cloud-based sales lifecycle management platform HomeBuy360 for $2 million.
Last October, Square Yards announced the acquisition of Ahmedabad-based Oryden Tech Labs, which specialises in 3D architectural and industrial visualisation, 2D animation, and creative design. This week, it raised $12 million from Anil Ambani-led Reliance group.