Google backs online real estate portal NoBroker

NoBroker, India's first proptech unicorn, has extended its Series E funding round with an infusion from Google. 

With the investment, the internet giant joins existing investors General Atlantic, Tiger Global and Moore Strategic Ventures from whom the Bengaluru-based company raised $210 million in November 2021 at a valuation of $1 billion. 

NoBroker will seek to leverage Google's expertise and experience of building consumer tech products to build unique solutions for its society management service app called NoBrokerHood and create products to help home searching experience better on the platform, Akhil Gupta, Co-founder and Chief Technology and Product Officer of the company announced on Twitter. 

“We are excited to collaborate with Google. One of the key areas where we’ll leverage this partnership will be to build unique solutions that help simplify the lives of the residents of NoBrokerHood societies. Our objective is to aggressively grow and reach 1 lakh societies in the next few years”, Gupta said in a separate statement. 

The company said the funding will help it reach out to more customers across current and new cities and streamline the entire real estate journey with the help of technology. 

Currently, the company operates across six cities such as Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi-NCR, Hyderabad, Mumbai, and Pune while NoBrokerHood operates in 5 additional cities - Kolkata, Coimbatore, Ahmedabad, Jaipur, and Lucknow. 

Founded in 2013 by Indian Institute of Technology alumni Amit Agarwal, Akhil Gupta and Saurabh Garg, NoBroker was started as a property listing platform for rentals but gradually entered into a handful segments including buy and sell services; home services such as packers and movers, painting and cleaning; financial services including rent payment, insurance, home loans and community management.

As per the company, more than 1 crore properties are registered on the platform, and more than 2.5 crore individuals have used its services. 

“We are seeing an upward trend in the property buying segment and this funding will help us deepen our investments in resale and primary sale verticals. We have seen increasing demand for people wanting to rent and buy houses in gated communities. It is an opportune time to build solutions that would elevate society living experience for residents and this partnership will help us achieve this goal faster,” Garg said. 

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