[Funding alert] Brick&Bolt raises $1.5M led by Sequoia Surge and others

Brick&Bolt has raised $1.5 million in Pre-Series A funding, led by Sequoia India’s rapid scale-up programme Surge, with participation from angel investors like Livspace founders, Aakash Goel of Trifecta Capital, Meghna Agarwal of Indiqube, and Navin Dhanuka of Piramal Fund Management.

The startup will use the funding to invest in enhancing the company’s core tech platform, expanding its business into Tier II and III cities, and growing its current team.

Speaking of the funding, Jayesh Rajpurohit, Co-founder of Brick&Bolt, said, “The construction industry in India is poised to reach $640 billion industry in 2022, aided by government initiatives in infrastructure development and affordable housing. Through Brick&Bolt, we want to tap into this massive market, providing a platform that combines technology with transparent processes, making the construction industry organised, accessible, and seamless for both residential and commercial users."

He adds that between now and 2025, 17 of the 20 fastest growing cities in the world will be in India.

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Founded in 2018, Brick&Bolt operates in the residential construction space and has 260 projects in Bengaluru, with a roster of 250 curated contractors. 

The startup has already begun supply-chain operations of construction materials for its existing sites. Brick&Bolt is also planning to enter the commercial construction (B2B) market in the next few months.

Following an ecommerce model, it provides tech systems and process to make home and commercial construction simple, hassle-free and reliable for its customers.

Brick&Bolt mitigates issues of finding the right contractors, quality issues, price escalation, and project delays by making the entire experience from design to execution seamless. It does this by connecting suitable contractors and architects to customers, enabling transparent pricing and also levying penalties on the service provider in case of delays. 

“Currently, the players are only looking at project management and the core tech. There hardly are any construction services or any platform that looks at end-to-end service. A regular consumer has a lot of challenges when they want to build a home, we want to address all of those challenges,” says Jayesh.  

The process is further augmented by an AI-based engine predicting the work schedules and managing quality and progress of on-going projects using computer vision. The average ticket size of the consumers is at Rs 50 lakh and Brick&Bolt focusses primarily on a B2C market, but Jayesh adds that the company is getting into the B2B market organically. 

He says the startup has closed a deal with a villa plot developer and are looking at few more. 

“Currently, Real Estate Regulatory Authority (RERA) laws are applied only for large construction projects, whereas smaller residential projects do not have any specific laws in place to manage them. Brick&Bolt is helping customers realise their dreams by implementing RERA like features in home and small construction making it transparent and reliable for them,” said Arpit Rajpurohit, Co-founder, Brick&Bolt.

(Edited by Saheli Sen Gupta)