PropTech start-up BuildSupply said that they have raised an undisclosed amount for its Pre-Series A financing round led by Gree Ventures a premier Japanese Tech Venture fund, with participation from Venture Highway a fund advised by Niraj Arora, Global Head of Business at WhatsApp, Sonny Kalsi, Founder at GreenOak Real Estate and some industry leading names like Kalpesh Mehta, Rohit Srivastava and Sameer Brij Verma of Nexus Partners.
BuildSupply aims to bring about standardization and transparency in the Real Estate Development and Construction processes. The company founded by Sameer Nayar (ex-Head of Credit Suisse Real Estate, Asia-Pac), Nipun Yadvinder and Sarit Sethi is India’s most advanced ERP system for the Real Estate and Construction industry, especially developed for this sector.
It is an easy to adopt, functional solution and the same has been validated by a number of industry leading companies like Godrej Properties Limited, SARE Homes and Nelson India. The team began their journey in April, 2016 and launched the product earlier this year. The recent investment round will enable BuildSupply to expand their product and tech team and establish a base across all major metros.
“Real Estate and Construction is one of the largest industries in India with a tremendous multiplier effect. The government intends to dramatically increase the scale and size of affordable housing, smart cities and general infrastructure. Our product allows for companies to create tremendous scale and operational efficiency. It can help create cost savings of 8-10% in a single project” Said Sameer Nayar, the Founder.
“While India is on a solid path to be the largest construction market globally, internally the real-estate developers, both private and public, face tough challenges in cost estimation, transparent procurement, and vendor management. BuildSupply’s solution is coming at an opportune time, leveraging on the GST and RERA frameworks, to solve these key challenges for the industry. We are very excited to partner with BuildSupply’s highly experienced team on this journey” said Nikhil Kapur, Senior Investment Manager at Gree.
“The founding team at BuildSupply has a great mix of experience in Real Estate, Technology and Construction. They have developed a cutting edge industry leading solution for the Indian market that has wide applicability in the global markets. We are delighted to partner with them for their next phase of growth” said Samir Sood, Founder at Venture Highway.
“PropTech as a sector has attracted tremendous interest in the US in the past few years. I expect investments in this sector to increase dramatically in India as well. I have known and worked with Sameer for a long time and am very confident of his abilities to solve some of the most intractable problems for this industry” added Sonny Kalsi, Founder at GreenOak Real Estate and Member of the Board of Directors at Oberoi Realty.
On a scale of zero being well behind the curve, and 10 at the cutting edge, on digital and innovation maturity, more than half (53 percent) real estate leaders globally ranked themselves at five or less, with just 13 percent considering themselves to be at the cutting edge of PropTech thus there is a significant movement lever. The Indian market is still very slow in adapting to some of these new technologies.
In a survey of over 100 companies conducted internally by BuildSupply only roughly half had ever engaged with software solutions and less than 15% were using them on an ongoing basis. This presents a dramatic opportunity for a company like BuildSupply to bring process improvements, standardisation and transparency in this $150 BN a year market.
