Square Yards Raises $20 Mn From BCCL, Genkai Capital And Others

Proptech company Square Yards has raised $20 Mn equity funding round from a clutch of investors including Bennett Coleman & Co Limited (BCCL), Genkai Capital, founders of PropertyGuru Steve Melhuish and Jani Rautiainen, Koh Boon Hwee, former chairman of Singtel and DBS along with the participation of some existing investors. 

This round brings the total equity funding raised by the Gurugram-based startup to $50 Mn. In addition to this, Square Yards has also raised around $25 Mn in debt financing. Square Yards estimates its valuation to be in the range of $260 Mn to $300 Mn.  

Going forward, the company wants to aggressively ramp up its investments in strengthening its technology infrastructure, building a go-to consumer brand, as well as expanding to newer geographies in emerging countries especially those that have a large primary residential market and fragmented distribution.  

Commenting on the investment, Masatoshi Matsu of Genkai Capital said, “Future of residential brokerage business will be data-based rather than relationship based where we feel a little worried about transparency and fairness. Square Yards is at the forefront of this tectonic shift and is creating a great system  for this innovation to happen.”

 Anil Ambani’s Reliance Group-backed Square Yards was founded by Tanuj Shori and Kanika Gupta in 2014. It is a real estate aggregation and transaction platform enabling the complete lifecycle of owning and living in a home including research, due diligence, selling, financing and more. 

 The mortgage arm of the startup, Square Capital, uses its own tech stack to make mortgages easy and convenient for home seekers with completely automated workflows that include online identity and credit verification.

Further, the Square Yards recently launched an artificial intelligence-enabled enterprise technology solution called Edge to empower the sales and distribution functions of other real estate entities like developers and large brokerage houses, in India and select international markets.

With a presence across 10 countries, Square Yards claims to be enabling annual transactions of assets worth around $1 Bn and has a revenue run rate of $44 Mn. On the mortgage side, Square Capital claimed to have disbursed over $1 Bn worth of home loans by June 2019. 

Proptech Sector In India

 The proptech sector in India is fuelled by rapid urbanisation and rural migration to cities. India has the largest number of proptech startups (77 of 179 funded proptech startups) in Asia-Pacific.

Earlier in June, NoBroker.com has raised $51 Mn Series C funding led by General Atlantic, along with the participation of BEENEXT and SAIF Partners. 

Later, Delhi-NCR based real estate marketplace Clicbrics also raised $3 Mn in a Pre-Series A funding round led by former Tiger Management Lieutenant Manny Singh of Kavi Fund; Peter Mann, fund manager at Gluskin Sheff along with a senior managing director of one a Canadian pension fund and several high profile private investors from USA and Canada.

Real estate sector in India is expected to reach a market size of $1 Tn by 2030 from $120 Bn in 2017 and contribute 13% of the country’s GDP by 2025. Some of the online players in the segment include Quikr, Square Yards, NoBroker.com etc.