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Also in this letter:
■ IPO won’t be driven by bravado: MobiKwik CEO
■ GoDaddy breach exposes up to 1.2 million people’s data
■ Cryptocurrencies post inflows in latest week, led by bitcoin
NoBroker is India’s first proptech unicorn after $210 million funding
NoBroker founders
NoBroker, a Bengaluru-based real estate startup, has raised $210 million in its Series E funding round, led by General Atlantic, Tiger Global and Moore Strategic Ventures.
Valuation: The funding took place at a post-money valuation of $1.01 billion, making NoBroker India’s first property tech—or proptech—unicorn and the 36th unicorn minted amid unprecedented funding this year. It was last valued at $400 million when it raised funds in April 2020.
The valuation jump comes on the back of increased buying and selling of real estate, the company’s additional offerings, and a drop in interest rates post-Covid.
NoBroker will use the funds to build its product and technology team, go deeper into existing markets and enter more markets, for marketing, and to build NoBroker Hood, its “gated-community” app and marketplace.
One-stop shop: The Bengaluru-headquartered startup was founded by Saurabh Garg, Akhil Gupta and Amit Kumar Agarwal in 2013. Garg said, “In the past couple of years we have transformed ourselves from just a real estate transaction platform to a one-stop-shop. And this has given us a huge boost because clearly the number of transactions is increasing and customers are finding a lot more value in our services,” said.
Covid boost: The startup said it also saw a boost in demand for home buying during Covid. “A huge number of transactions are coming from end-use customers, not investors who want to flip real estate quickly. So the demand has been robust,” said Gupta, adding that sees this trend continuing in the near future.
What it does: NoBroker operates a brokerage-free real estate platform and captures the entire customer journey—everything from listing a house to hiring packers and movers, securing a home loan, painting and cleaning services, legal services and rent payments, among other things.
It claims to have more than 1.5 crore registered users across six cities—Bengaluru, Mumbai, Pune, Chennai, Hyderabad and Delhi-NCR—but hasn’t revealed how many of them pay for its services.
What is proptech? Property technology or proptech is the use of technology to help individuals and companies buy, sell or manage real estate. Technology-driven startups in the real estate sector are thus called proptech startups. These are three broad verticals that proptech startups fall into.
- Smart Real Estate: These are tech platforms that facilitate the operation and management of real estate assets. The platforms may simply provide information about building or urban centre performance, or they may directly facilitate or control building services. This sector supports real estate asset, property and facilities management.
- The Shared Economy: This describes platforms that facilitate the use of real estate assets. These can be land or buildings, offices, shops and types of property. This sector supports the real estate occupier markets.
- Real Estate FinTech: These are tech platforms that facilitate the trading of real estate asset ownership. The assets can be buildings, shares or funds, debt or equity. This sector supports the real estate capital markets.
Proptech in India: Proptech startups in India include NoBroker, Magicbricks*, NestAway, 99acres, PropTiger-Housing, among others. (Full disclosure: *Times Internet, which publishes ETtech, is the owner of Magicbricks).
A report by Housing.com in March said that despite the pandemic, India’s proptech sector attracted over $551 million in investments in 2020, more than the $549 million they raised in 2019.
The report noted that while the majority of transactions in India’s estimated $1.4 billion real estate industry are still conducted offline, more than 50% of real estate buying decisions start with an online search. This, it said, showed the growing influence of proptech companies in India. It estimated that the potential market for proptech firms could be one billion people by 2025.
Won’t be driven by bravado, CEO says, as MobiKwik puts off IPO
This morning we reported exclusively that fintech firm MobiKwik was likely to delay its initial public offering by a few months, following the disastrous market debut of larger rival Paytm last week. Within hours, the company’s CEO confirmed the company was putting off its IPO.
What he said: “We did want to have it (the IPO) around November. We have a one-year window, from October, to list and obviously we will do it when we feel that we are going to have a successful IPO,” founder and CEO Bipin Preet Singh said.
“We don’t do it based on bravado, based on being aggressive and hopeful. You create maximum opportunity for success because you do this one time in the history of the company so you want it to be successful.”
The Paytm effect: MobiKwik received Sebi’s approval for a Rs 1,900 crore IPO in October. Its investors include Bajaj Finance, Sequoia Capital and Abu Dhabi Investment Authority. But after Paytm’s dismal showing, bankers and analysts warned that future IPOs in India could be affected, with some naming MobiKwik’s IPO in particular.
But Singh said his company, which is yet to break even, was very close to profitability as it continued to build its payments and buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) businesses.
Paytm stock rises: Shares of Paytm’s parent firm One97 Communications recovered on Tuesday after two days of decline. The company’s stock was at Rs 1,494.95 at close of day on Tuesday, up 9.4% from the previous day’s close.
Bang-for-buck IPO: Meanwhile, Latent View Analytics, whose Rs 600-crore IPO was subscribed a record 338 times, made a stellar market debut on Tuesday.
The stock was listed at Rs 530 on the BSE, a 169.04% premium over the issue price of Rs 197. On the NSE, it debuted at Rs 512.20, up 160%.
The company commanded a market cap of Rs 3,896 crore at the issue price. This shot up to Rs 10,484.16 crore thanks to a strong listing.
ETtech Done Deals
■ Pune-headquartered Haber, which makes AI-driven industrial robots, said it has raised $20 million in Series B funding, taking its total funds raised to $27 million. Ascent Capital was the lead investor in the round, along with Accel, Elevation Capital, BEENEXT, Temasek partner Mukul Chawla and the founders of GreyOrange, another robot as a service company, Samay Kohli and Akash Gupta.
■ Niantic Inc., the augmented reality (AR) platform behind Pokemon Go, raised $300 million from hedge fund Coatue at a valuation of $9 billion, the company said. It plans to use the funds to expand its recently launched Lightship platform to help developers with their AR creations and build their visions for “the Real-World Metaverse”.
■ Consumer technology brand Nothing on Tuesday said its $50 million funding round announced last month involved film producer Karan Johar, cricketer Yuvraj Singh and others. In October, Nothing had announced the completion of a series-A extension of $50 million (around Rs 376 crore) from strategic and private investors. At the time, it had not commented on the full list of investors.
■ True Credits — an NBFC and affiliate of an RBI-authorised lending company True Balance — on Tuesday announced a debt fundraise of $30 million (about Rs 223.2 crore) from investors including Northern Arc, Arthmate and Shine Star. With this, its total debt raised in FY2021 stood at $55 million.
Tweet of the day
GoDaddy security breach exposes up to 1.2 million WordPress users’ data
Web hosting company GoDaddy Inc said that the email addresses of up to 1.2 million active and inactive Managed WordPress customers had been exposed in an unauthorised third-party access.
The company said the incident was discovered on November 17 and the third party accessed the system using a compromised password.
Quote: “We identified suspicious activity in our Managed WordPress hosting environment and immediately began an investigation with the help of an IT forensics firm and contacted law enforcement,” chief information security officer Demetrius Comes said.
The company said it had immediately blocked the unauthorised third party, and an investigation was underway.
The original WordPress Admin password that was set at the time of provisioning was also exposed.
- “If those credentials were still in use, we reset those passwords. For active customers, sFTP and database usernames and passwords were exposed. We reset both passwords,” said GoDaddy.
Cryptocurrencies post inflows in latest week, led by bitcoin
Cryptocurrency products and funds posted inflows in the latest week, with investors undeterred by the latest price corrections, weekly data from digital asset manager CoinShares showed.
The numbers: Institutional investors poured in $154 million into the crypto sector in the week ended November 19, with a year-to-date total of $9.2 billion, already exceeding total inflows of $6.7 billion in 2020.
The Big B: Bitcoin got the lion’s share of inflows with $114.4 million, equivalent to 74% of the total. So far this year, total inflows into bitcoin products and funds stands at $6.7 billion.
The inflows came despite a 10.4% drop in the value of bitcoin last week. On Monday, it was down 4.5% at $56,042. The world’s largest cryptocurrency hit a record high of $69,000 on November 10.
“Bitcoin was ripe for a pullback and it might not be over yet before traders confidently feel a bottom has been made,” said Edward Moya, senior market analyst at OANDA in New York.
Blockchain data provider Glassnode, in its latest research report on Monday, said bitcoin holders took profits after it hit a record high earlier this month.
Today’s ETtech Top 5 newsletter was curated by Arun Padmanabhan in New Delhi and Zaheer Merchant in Mumbai. Graphics and illustrations by Rahul Awasthi.
