Mumbai based online real estate startup Housing.com valued at about $250 million (Rs 1,500 crore) with Soft-Bank acquiring a 30 percent stake for its investment of $70 million. Earlier in June this year Housing.com has raised $2.5 Million funding from Nexus Venture of which almost $1 million was used to buy the Housing.com domain name.
The sources said it is a 'pre-money' valuation, denoting that the worth of the company was arrived at before Soft-Bank's investment. 'Post money', which is after the investment round closes, the valuation would be substantially higher, they said. SoftBank and Housing. com did not reply to email queries on the development.
Japan's SoftBank has made its third investment in India in less than a month by leading a funding round of $100 million (Rs 610 crore) in realty portal Housing.com.
Other investors in this round for Housing include hedge fund Falcon Edge, Russian billionaire Yuri Milner's DST Global and the existing investors including Helion Venture Partners, Nexus Venture Partners and Qualcomm Ventures.
The funds raised by Housing.com will be used by the startup to expand operations, build new technology, increase hiring and marketing spend.
Housing.com was launched two years ago by a team of engineers from IIT-Bombay namely Rahul Yadav & Advitya Sharma and 10 more people. Short of cash and with no job in hand, the youthful team with an average age of 22 years started approaching investors in 2012. One of their first investors, former Network18 Group CEO Haresh Chawla, invited all 12 founders to dinner at his home in 2012. He loved the startup idea so much that he immediately committed to invest Rs 1.5 crore in Housing.com team.
Housing.com started with a brokerage model but the team soon realized that business needed a lot of local knowledge so they soon pivoted to a marketplace model in December 2012.
So far, SoftBank has invested $627 million (Rs 3,800 crore) in Snapdeal last month and $210 million in online cab booking service Ola, the latest deal makes it the single-largest investor in Indian startups. Softbank's ace executives in their last visit, in an official announcement, had already announced that SoftBank aims to invest $10 billion in India.
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