TMCnet News

US hedge fund Falcon Edge backs Housing.com [India Business] [Times of India]
[October 24, 2014]

US hedge fund Falcon Edge backs Housing.com [India Business] [Times of India]


(Times of India Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) MUMBAI: Real estate portal Housing.com is close to sealing a $40-50 million funding round being led by a New York-based hedge fund Falcon Edge Capital at a time when Indian consumer internet ventures have been attracting big money from financial investors. Other new investors who are likely to come on board are Nirvana Venture Advisors, run by Amit Patni of the Patni family, and Russian tycoon Yuri Milner who is expected to make a personal investment of about a million dollars in the company. TOI had reported earlier about the DST Global chief's investments in Housing and taxi service startup Olacabs.



Housing's latest financing round comes just three months after it announced a $20 million fund-raise from a clutch of investors. Started by 12 IIT-Bombay graduates, Housing is a two year-old map-based real estate portal which helps people rent, sell and buy houses.

When contacted by TOI, Advitiya Sharma, co-founder Housing, declined to comment while Falcon Edge could not be reached immediately for a comment. This would be the first direct investment for the hedge fund here; it's an existing investor in global food delivery marketplace Foodpanda which has operations in India.


Founded by Richard Gerson together with Navroz D Udwadia and James Minshull, Falcon Edge leads the pack of a new breed of Wall Street hedge funds, managing $2 billion in assets. It was one of the few hedge funds post the financial crisis in 2012 to have raised more than $1 billion of corpus.

Without commenting specifically on the latest financing round, Sharma said Housing had recently launched a home loan section with an algorithm which customizes loan types as per users needs. It has tied up with banks including Citibank, Axis Bank, among others, for facilitating the loans, he said. "We have got on board more than 10,000 new projects from builders in just four months from launch and are now in over 45 cities in." In June, Housing received fresh capital from Qualcomm Ventures, Helion Venture Partners and existing investor Nexus Venture Partners. Seen as a disruptive house-hunting website because of its technology backbone and heavy focus on data and analytics, Housing has already raised four rounds of funding since its inception in 2012. It competes with the likes of 99acres, Magicbricks, part of the Times Group which publishes this paper, and new-age startups like Bangalore-based Commonfloor.

Having started off from Powai, home to the prestigious IIT in Mumbai, the startup claims to having 15,000 property brokers on its platform and managing to get 3,000 listings per day. Housing is set to launch a new product which will facilitate online buying of houses. Sharma, however, did not offer details about the new platform. It is also expected to start a new service called rent agreement generator which may start in Bangalore soon.

(c) 2014 Bennett, Coleman & Company Limited

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]