Indian FSBO Vertical NoBroker Ties Up Funding Round to Become a PropTech Unicorn

Indian housing marketplace NoBroker has announced that it has raised $210 million dollars in a Series E funding round and has become a 'Unicorn' in the process.

The Bangalore based company's latest investment round comes just over 18 months after its last round and was co-led by existing investors Tiger Global and General Atlantic along with Moore Strategic Ventures. The latest round values the Proptech company at just over $1 billion and brings the total amount of investment capital it has raised to $361 million.

The company plans to use the capital to expand NoBroker's services from its 6 current markets to 50 more Indian cities within the next two years.

In a Linkedin post, co-founder Akhil Gupta praised NoBroker's staff saying that the company was "blessed with a team made in heaven" and put the company's success down to its "customer first approach".

Founded in 2014 by Akhil Gupta, Saurabh Garg and Amit Kumar Agarwal, NoBroker is a platform for individuals to list their properties for sale or rent without brokerage fees. The company charges a subscription fee to users and has also moved into adjacent areas such as cleaning, decoration, pest control and repair services in recent years.

NoBroker also operates a community management and forum app named NoBrokerhood which competes with MyGate Homes which recently tied up a listings deal with REA India. The platform is similar in some aspects to western platforms like Nextdoor but also acts as a marketplace for items that residents wish to sell to one another and also has a functionality to control visits.

According to a report by Startuptalky.com, the company saw huge growth in 2020 as revenues climbed from Rs 18 crores ($2.4 million) to Rs 63 crores ($8.5 million). With the Indian real estate ramping back up after a period of lockdowns and disruptions and the upward trend in home buying activity that the company is seeing, the outlook for future growth looks good for NoBroker.