Real estate portal Housing has announced that it has secured a fresh round of funding of Rs 100 crore from Softbank, its largest investor. The company said the funding will be used to drive its new strategy and growth plans.
“Softbank is one of the world’s largest and most successful investors. Their continued support as both investors and advisors to Housing.com is invaluable to us and signifies their long-term commitment to the company,” Housing CEO Jason Kothari said in a statement.
“We are now well-capitalized to aggressively execute on our focused strategy and growth plans and believe 2016 will be a great year for the company,” he added.
Prior to this investment, Housing had raised $139.5 million in total from four rounds of funding. Housing’s last round of funding was in December 2014 where it raised $90 million from Softbank with participation from Falcon Edge and other unnamed investors. At the time the company was valued at Rs 1,500 crore as indicated by this report by Economic Times.
Restructuring and valuations
Since the tumultuous exit of Housing’s founder Rahul Yadav as CEO in July 2015 and subsequent restructuring in the company, Housing’s valuation has fallen to about $50 million. Housing had a round of job cuts in November 2015 as the company decided to focus more on home buying. The company did not reveal the reduction of employees but an Economic Times report pegged the number at 200.
In August 2015, Housing confirmed that it had let go of 160 employees but MediaNama had received an anonymous tip-off that the number of staff cuts could be as high as 1,100, almost half of its workforce, and most of the people who would be affected would be the company’s ground and operational staff.
Housing’s acquisitions
In September 2015, Housing acquired Plat, a startup that operates as an online network for agents allowing them to share real estate inventories and requirements. It had also acquired BigBHK, a property management software targeted at rentals suppliers. Other than this, Housing also acquired sales lifecycle management HomeBuy360 for $2 million in May 2015, the Delhi-based real estate analytics portal Realty Business Intelligence for an estimated $2-4 million and the realty-focused online community Indian Real Estate Forum (IREF) for Rs 8 crore in March 2015.
