The online home rental marketplace had secured a cumulative funding of $110 million at the latest valuation of $220 million in 2019, garnering investments from marquee investors such as Tiger Global, Flipkart, Goldman Sachs, Yuri Milner, and UC-RNT Fund, which is a venture capital fund co-managed by Ratan Tata’s RNT Associates and the University of California.
On Thursday, ET was first to report that Aurum PropTech is set to buy NestAway by acquiring stakes of all existing shareholders.
In addition to the Rs 90 crores consideration towards acquisition of up to 100% share capital, Aurum PropTech will inject around Rs 30 crores to stabilize the business further.
“The strategic acquisition of NestAway greatly amplifies the Integrated proptech ecosystem that Aurum has established thus far. NestAway’s tech driven revolution in the rental housing market is in perfect accord with our mission to revolutionize the residential rental industry in India,” said Ashish Deora, Founder and CEO of Aurum Ventures.
The capital infusion in NestAway is a testament to Aurum PropTech’s conviction in India’s $20-billion Rental Housing market, he added.
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In June 2022, Aurum PropTech acquired NestAway’s co-living subsidiary HelloWorld. After successfully scaling up HelloWorld’s operations within a year, Aurum PropTech has strategically acquired NestAway.The founders of HelloWorld, Jitendra Jagadev and Ismail Khan, who were originally part of the founding team at NestAway, will now lead NestAway post the acquisition.
Aurum PropTech will be appointing Jagadev as the Chief Executive Officer and Ismail Khan as the Chief Operating Officer of NestAway.
“When we started NestAway, our vision was to revolutionize the way people live in cities by providing them with convenient, affordable, and hassle-free housing solutions. Over the years, we have grown and expanded, serving thousands of customers, becoming a trusted brand in the PropTech industry. NestAway has many milestones to achieve,” said Jitendra Jagadev, Founder of NestAway.
According to him, Aurum PropTech’s passion for innovation and customer-centricity, makes them the perfect partner to fuel NestAway’s growth and help realize the vision on an even larger scale.
Pre-pandemic, NestAway featured 50,000 properties on its platform and achieved an annualized revenue of INR 100 crores, attracting a significant website traffic of 1 million visits. It is counted amongst the top 5 proptech brands in India.
Currently, NestAway features 18,000 properties on its platform and has an annualized revenue of Rs 30 crores, attracting website traffic of 600,000 visits.
Founded in 2015, NestAway with an emphasis on technology and data intermediates with homeowners and offers end-to-end solutions, including property listing, tenant screening, rent collection, maintenance, and dispute resolution. With this approach, it streamlines the rental process and eliminates common challenges faced by tenants. It provides a comprehensive solution as an intermediary for every step of the home rental process.
This will be Aurum PropTech’s eighth proptech-related acquisition in the last two years. It had earlier acquired NestAway’s co-living subsidiary HelloWorld and has helped prop up its annualised revenue to Rs 72 crore from Rs 38 crore.
It has also acquired real estate data analytics company CareerSocially and Myre Capital. The company has built a robust data analytics practice with SaaS-based products and services for the real estate sector, which amplifies the effect of Aurum’s existing products, BeyondWalls broker aggregation platform and Sell.Do CRM.
Since the acquisition of Aurum PropTech by Aurum Ventures in June 2021, it has acquired control of SaaS-based technology firms K2V2 Technologies Private Ltd (Sell.do) and Monk Tech Labs (TheHouseMonk). It has also invested in Integrow Asset Management, an asset management company.
In 2022, Aurum PropTech also acquired a 53% equity stake in Bengaluru-based co-living company Grexter Housing Solutions.