CommonFloor joins Freshdesk in Google Capital portfolio. Here’s what it means to the Indian startups

(From left:) Lalit Mangal, Sumit Jain, and Vikas Malpani, founders of CommonFloor

Google Capital today announced its second investment in India – real estate portal CommonFloor, a tech-based disruptor in this space which is poised for take-off.

Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Roorkee graduates Sumit Jain and Lalit Mangal started CommonFloor in December 2007 with another techie friend Vikas Malpani. Initially, it was meant to be an online space where people living in apartment complexes could collaborate to solve problems. It grew into a real estate portal when people started posting their houses for rent or sale on the site. But its key differentiator is still the community nature of CommonFloor, which combines property search with apartment and vendor management. For example, a prospective buyer can send out a query on amenities, child safety, or any other aspect of living in a particular apartment complex, and she is likely to get responses from people actually living there.

Sumit Jain, co-founder and CEO of CommonFloor, tells Tech in Asia:

The community angle of CommonFloor is unique to us. Not just in India, but globally, nobody has managed to merge real estate business with a community network approach. That is one of the reasons why Google Capital has invested in us. Our approach of building a community platform instead of just a real estate portal got their interest. With Google coming on board, we are even more excited to develop this further.

CommonFloor, which raised US$30 million from Tiger Global in a series E round four months back, has more than 100,000 residential projects listed from over 200 cities. The platform has mapped 10 million homes and has 500,000 active property listings, verified by a team of over 1,000 employees across the country. Google Capital thus comes in at a critical scaling up point for the portal as it fights for a leadership position in this vast market.

Only yesterday it announced the acqui-hire of the three founders of a young startup named Bakfy which had made an anonymous chat app for students. They will now help execute CommonFloor’s mobile and social networking strategy. So the influence of Google appears to have already kicked in.

“Google Capital is not coming as just financial investors. They are bringing a lot more to the table – their knowledge and expertise of building a world class global product. We look forward to drawing on that as we continue to scale our business,” says Jain.

This will be vital for the Bangalore-based CommonFloor in its tussle with another real estate portal started by IIT engineers – the Mumbai-based Housing, which recently raised US$90 million from Japan’s SoftBank.

See: What makes this Indian real estate portal uncommon

Google Capital, which is the second venture capital arm of the search giant, focuses on the growth stage of startups, while Google Ventures mostly makes early stage investments. So far, since its launch in the summer of 2013, Google Capital has made just ten bets, seven of them in the US. The only ones outside America are Chinese optical components maker Innolight, India’s cloud-based customer support software maker Freshdesk, which is headquartered in San Francisco, and now CommonFloor. So this is quite a rarefied environment that the Indian real estate portal is entering. The best part of belonging to this club is gaining access to the tech wizards at Google for strategic insights.

David Lawee, partner at Google Capital, says, “The online real estate market in India is poised for tremendous growth, which is why we’re excited to work closely with CommonFloor’s excellent team in the months and years ahead.”