The company had raised $90 million in 2014 led by SoftBank in the last round and is now focusing on acquisitions to accelerate growth.
As part of Info Edge’s executive leadership team for a decade, Vineet built 99Acres and Naukri and he will now closely work with the Housing management team in a senior advisory role. Currently, Vineet is co-founder, CEO & MD of Buildczar, a marketplace for building materials and finishing products.
“There was a lot of momentum in last one year. It was becoming a cool thing to be a founder however, startup should be more than that.”
‘Routing’ allows consumers to search for a home based on commute time or on-road distance from any specific establishment. Targeted for buy and sell category, this feature is currently live on the website and available for home seekers in Mumbai, Pune, Chennai, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Kolkata and Delhi-NCR.
The new funds will help the company to drive its new strategy and growth plans. The company has established a focused strategy on buying and selling homes and is building scalable revenue streams, demand and supply and is also going deeper in the value chain towards facilitating and fulfilling transactions.
Housing spent close to 120 crores for the aggressive Lookup campaign. The company has now brought in Jason Kothari as the CEO, who is focusing more on revenue side of things and has also culled a few areas which weren’t core to Housing (followed by massive layoffs). Housing has raised $139.5M in total.
Housing has decided to dissolve a committee setup by its investors, created to keep a track on management, finances and operations of the company. The development came after Jason Kothari was appointed as the new CEO.
The company says that the move was under taken due to the booming home-buying segment in India.Housing is also reportedly laying off employees to reduce its workforce; the exact number has not been declared by the company yet.
Since August, Jason has played an instrumental role on a number of key initiatives, including establishing a strong senior management team for the company by hiring Chief Financial Officer Mani Rangarajan, General Counsel Nandini Mehta, and Chief Marketing Officer Nikhil Rungta
With these acqui-hires, Housing.com acquires quality talent from premier institutions such as IIT Delhi and BITS Pilani.Housing now has more than 2551 employees in over 50 cities across India. With Plat, Housing.com strengthens its technology know-how to better cater to the needs of the agent community.
Leveraging this unique platform, developers and agents can streamline the entire sales lifecycle, by tracking inventory, managing customer relations and in effect drive efficiencies in their sale operations. This acquisition will also fortify Housing.com’s Data Science Lab (DSL) with rich data on inventory and transactions in the real estate sector.