Home rental startup NestAway has acquired rival Zenify.in for an undisclosed amount as it looks to ramp up its offerings for families, a company statement said.
NestAway Technologies Pvt. Ltd, which runs the eponymous platform, initially aggregated apartments for singles, but later started catering to families as well.
“We hope to disrupt and restructure the social infrastructure of housing for both singles and families in times to come,†Amarendra Sahu, chief executive of NestAway, said in the press note.
Following the acquisition, the combined entity will have over 4,000 homes for family tenants. The Zenify.in brand will continue to function independently under the NestAway umbrella, the statement added.
Zenify.in, founded in 2012 by IIT-Madras alumni Sudarshan Purohit, Ankur Agarwal and Kailash Rathi, manages the entire lifecycle of a rental agreement. It takes up properties from landlords and rents it out to tenants.
City Synapse Information Pvt. Ltd, which runs Zenify.in, had raised about $900,000 (around Rs 6 crore) in pre-Series A funding from a group of high-net-worth individuals (HNIs) in May 2016. Prior to that, it had raised Rs 4 crore in angel funding from MSC Srikanth and M Bharath, directors at K12 Techno Service Pvt. Ltd, and Atul Jalan, founder and chief executive of Mathan Software Service Pvt Ltd.
NestAway had raised around $30 million (around Rs 200 crore then) in Series C financing led by Tiger Global, Russian billionaire Yuri Milner and IDG Ventures India, in addition to raising an undisclosed amount from Tata Sons chairman emeritus Ratan Tata in 2016. It had raised Rs 76 crore (approximately $12 million then) from e-commerce firm Flipkart and its investor Tiger Global in June 2013.
The company was founded by Sahu, Smruti Parida, Deepak Dhar and Jitendra Jagadev in January 2015. Available as an app and web site, it turns ‘for-rent’ apartments into managed, fully-furnished houses and provides them to pre-verified tenants.
Other deals in the home rental space include online classifieds firm Quikr India Pvt Ltd, which acquired Mumbai-based home rental startup Grabhouse last November. Cryptopy Technologies Pvt. Ltd, which operates Grabhouse, had raised $12.5 million from Kalaari Capital and Sequoia Capital.
In the same month, Bengaluru-based peer-to-peer (P2P) property listing portal for renting homes NoBroker.com raised an undisclosed amount from Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma.
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