[Funding alert] Home construction marketplace Kolo raises $550K from Better Capital

Bengaluru-based home construction marketplace Kolo has raised $550,000 in a pre-seed funding round led by Better Capital. Home construction VC Singularity Ventures, and other marquee angel investors, including Ex-GoPay CEO Aldi Haryopratomo, Jiva.ag CPO Aakash, Shopup CEO Sujayath, GSF Founder Rajesh Sawhney, and Ex-Babajobs Founder Vir Kasyap.  

Kolo will use the funds for building the initial team, product development, and establishing a dominant position in the first few markets in India.

Founded by Southeast Asian unicorn GoJek's former executives Jery Althaf, Pranav Garg, Aayush Sharda, and Vivek Mittal, Kolo provides a social-first digital platform for homeowners to construct their homes.

“We found that decision-making in home construction is inherently a ‘social’ activity. The homeowners go through huge volumes of content and interact with their family, relatives, and service professionals to make decisions about their ‘dream home’. So we are taking a social-first approach to support the entire home construction journey through Kolo,” said Jery Althaf, Co-Founder of Kolo.

Kolo aims to streamline the unorganised construction ecosystem. Apart from homeowners, Kolo provides a host of digital tools to the construction service providers and brands.

“We strongly believe in enabling the existing ecosystem of service providers, brands, and material providers,” said Pranav Garg, Co-Founder of Kolo.

“We got our inspiration when we saw large active Facebook communities formed around home. We were blown away by the hunger we saw there. We also had first-hand intense experiences during construction as both Pranav’s and my families recently constructed new homes,” Jerry added.  

Home is a high intent purchase for a majority of Indians who invest a significant amount of their wealth in building their homes.

The company said in most cases, they go through a painful experience of finding the right professionals, designs, materials, and workers in their desired budget, and then hustling with them.

Kolo’s vision is to provide a one-stop destination to help homeowners so that they can build their dream home without the hustle.

"Home is a $200 billion-plus untapped market that suffers from an opaque ecosystem and a broken consumer experience. Kolo's team, with their experience in building robust digital products at scale, has created a social-first format to lead with consumer experience in re-imagining the construction marketplace in India from the ground up. We are excited to partner with the Kolo team as they unlock this vision," said Vaibhav Domkundwar of Better Capital, an early backer of social innovators like Kutumb, Turnip, and others.