 "SoftBank's latest India pick: 30% stake in Housing.com for Rs 430 cr")
After diverse investments in the Indian startup space ranging from online e-tailer Snapdeal to cab service OlaCabs, SoftBank has now reportedly found a new Indian startup to invest in: Housing.com.
The Japanese bank has led a round of funding for housing portal Housing.com, in which $100 million was raised, by reportedly acquiring a 30 percent stake in the company with an investment of $70 million ( Rs 430 crore), reported the Economic Times.
According to the report, the startup has been valued at around $250 million ( Rs 1,546 crore), which an unnamed source is quoted as saying was the valuation prior to the investment by Softbank and it would be higher after the Japanese bank’s decision to invest.
Housing.com had raised Rs 115 crore in funding from Helion Venture Partners, Quancomm Ventures and Nexus Venture Partners in June this year.
Housing.com has been one of the fastest growing property-based startups in the country and has seen a large growth in users thanks to features that are seen as being more consumer-centric. As our profile of the startup's founders noted, they had a unique USP: Giving clients a near-perfect sense of properties and delivering realistic leads to brokers.
The company has also had innovative features such as a heat-map of the city based on per square feet prices, a topographic representation of amenities near property locations and time-decay algorithms to check by when a listing should have materialised into a deal.
The company currently claims to have mapped over 80,000 houses in Mumbai and 50,000 in Bangalore, with a presence in 25 cities across the country including Pune, Jaipur, Nagpur, Ghaziabad, Surat, Chennai and Delhi among others.
Recently, the company launched a new service that helps people create and customise property agreements online.
Housing.com was among the three start-ups that had been called to Japan by Softbank as the lender, that is fresh off the success of investing in Chinese e-retailer Alibaba, looked to increase its investments in India. Ai major investor in the internet space, SoftBank putting in a large sum of money validates the growth of Indian e-commerce and start-up space.
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