Tiger-Backed NestAway Bites The Dust – From $220 Mn Valuation To A $11 Mn Fire Sale

Aurum PropTech’s board approved the acquisition of home rental startup NestAway on Thursday for a consideration of up to INR 90 Cr ($10.93 Mn).

In addition to the INR 90 Cr consideration towards acquisition of up to 100% share capital, Aurum PropTech will inject INR 30 Cr to stabilise the business.

Post the acquisition, Aurum PropTech will appoint Jitendra Jagadev as the CEO and Ismail Khan as the COO of NestAway.

Nestaway was founded in January 2015 by Amarendra Sahu, Smruti Parida, Deepak Dhar and Jagadev. The startup is an online marketplace for home rentals that turns unfurnished houses into fully-furnished and managed apartments and rents them to pre-verified tenants.

Currently, NestAway features 18,000 properties on its platform and claims to have an annualised revenue of INR 30 Cr.

Till date, NestAway has secured a cumulative funding of $110 Mn from investors such as Tiger Global, UC-RNT Fund, Flipkart, Goldman Sachs and Yuri Milne, and was valued at $220 Mn in 2019.

While home rental startup NestAway invested $10 Mn towards its co-living and student living vertical Hello World back in 2019, Aurum PropTech also acquired HelloWorld from NestAway last year. After scaling up HelloWorld’s operations within a year, Aurum PropTech has strategically acquired NestAway, the company said in a statement.

“NestAway’s tech driven revolution in the rental housing market is in perfect accord with our mission to revolutionise the residential rental industry in India. Under the leadership of Jitendra and Ismail, we are confident that we can replicate the remarkable success of HelloWorld, taking NestAway to even greater heights,” Ashish Deora, founder and CEO of Aurum Ventures, said.

NestAway’s revenue from operations reportedly declined 36.2% to INR 57.87 Cr during the fiscal year ending March 2022 in comparison to INR 90.7 Cr in FY21. Its losses also increased 44.3% to INR 94.97 Cr during FY22 against INR 65.8 Cr in FY21.

As per Inc42’s ‘Annual Funding Report 2022, there were 240 merger and acquisition deals in the Indian startup ecosystem in 2022, 10% higher than in 2021’.

Amid global economic slowdown, layoffs, valuation cuts, shelved IPO plans, and funding winter, the year 2023 may see more M&As, especially slump sales.