Built World Technology Alliance Plans To Support Proptech Industry In India

Major names in the real estate sector including Robert Marten, Anuj Puri, Yash Gupta (Blue Sky Ventures), and Abhishek Goenka(Capital M-Menda Family Office) among others have taken up the onus to launch Built World Technology Alliance to work towards accelerating the digital transformation of India’s real estate sector.

The alliance, supported by India’s real estate leaders, has been founded as an opportunity for the startups and VCs to disrupt the Indian real estate sector.

It will be launched in an inaugural event –Built World Technology Show, which will be hosted in partnership with Blue Sky Ventures on February 20-21, 2019.

The alliance has S. Sriniwasan (Kotak), Ashish Khandelia (Certus Capital), Sameer Nayar (BuildSupply), Raja Seetharaman (Propstack), Anuj Nangpal (JLL Spark), Sidharth Menda (CoWrks), Ashish Singla, Rohit Rajput (Max Ventures), Steve Weikal (MIT), Michael Beckerman (CREtech), Ajay Prasad (Taurus) as its founding members.

Other members include Sanjay Chhabria (Radius Developers), Venu Kota (Visa), Vaibhav Agrawal (Lightspeed), Samir Kumar (Inventus), Maneesh Gaur (Marks & Spencer), Jogy P. Thomas (KORE Communities) and Avinash Sule (QIA) who will make for the founding members team.

The alliance will work with an aim of revolutionising the efficiency and safety of construction, and to improve the performance of buildings and satisfaction of employees.

With a huge industry and gap to address, the Alliance aims:

• To help real estate developers to pool their technology challenges and jointly evaluate solutions in order to accelerate the digital transformation of the real estate sector.
• To help investors with technology to stay ahead of the curve and to seek underlying trends
• To bring in efficiency, productivity, productivity, wellness, and connectivity that are high on agendas of corporate occupiers
• To help VCs and family offices find and nurture the next Unicorn and provide global exposure to their portfolio companies on request
• To provide proptech entrepreneurs with access to real estate community
• To help in connecting with global proptech network through its partnership with REtech (USA) and Future: PropTech (UK) and others.

Similar to the alliance is the tech-focused Real Estate Accelerator Programme (REAP), started by Brigade. The Brigade Reap helps entrepreneurs to create sustainable businesses in the real estate industry by utilising technology.

In May 2018, REAP had announced the selection of five final-five tech startups for its fourth Cohort. The selected startups will undergo mentorship and training for a period of four months starting today to make them industry-ready for consumption of their products or services.

More About Proptech Industry, Market Size, Opportunities 

Recently, home decor solutions provider proptech startup Foyr had raised an extended Series A round of $4.2 Mn from SRI Capital and its existing investors to enter the US market, which is expected to be its largest market in two years.

According to a JLL report, the Indian proptech scene is currently dominated by online brokerage platforms targeting the residential space, with a few players such as JLL India who have built online platforms for commercial brokerage.

Also, many proptech ventures are using technologies focused on Virtual and Augmented Reality to enable energy consumption monitoring, creating and simulating interior designs, smart solutions for services such as parking, waste management, and transportation.

JLL forecasts that funding for proptech startups in the Asia Pacific region will reach $4.5 Bn a year by 2020.

Note: We at Inc42 take our ethics very seriously. More information about it can be found here.