Tiger Global pumps $30 million more into CommonFloor. ‘Challenge will be to maintain culture,’ says CEO

“Every time we raise funding, we think we won’t have to raise it again. But we are shifting gears so fast that we need the fuel. The good thing is that we are able to effectively use the capital we raise.” That’s the response of Sumit Jain, co-founder and CEO of CommonFloor, one of India’s leading real estate portals, when Tech in Asia asks if the US$30 million series E round of funding he just announced is a precursor to an IPO.

The US$30 million fresh investment came from Tiger Global, which along with Accel India pumped in US$10.5 million in January this year. Since then, this Bangalore-based firm has grown 100 percent in terms of traffic, active property listings, and revenue.

Two IIT Roorkee engineers, Sumit Jain and Lalit Mangal, founded CommonFloor in December 2007 with their friend Vikas Malpani, another techie. What sets CommonFloor apart in the online real estate space is that it began as a community platform for house-owners, property seekers, and tenants to connect, interact, and solve issues. Today, although a huge real estate business has grown on top of it, a hyperlocal social network has developed alongside. As a result, 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.

To keep this unique culture intact while scaling up fast to more and more cities is a challenge. Currently, CommonFloor is in 18 Indian cities. The plan is to get to 22 cities by March next year. The team size is likely to grow from 900 to 1,500 by then.

“The helpful, community nature is our core value and it is something we will have to keep our eyes on while we scale. We cannot spread too thin,” Jain explains. Currently, the portal has 500,000 verified property listings. Of those, over 200,000 were posted by property owners themselves. “We got first-hand access to those properties because we are a community platform,” adds Jain.

See: What makes this Indian real estate portal uncommon?

The fresh investment will be put to work on product and technology that will enhance customer experience. For example, CommonFloor recently launched a virtual tour feature using floor-plans from builders. Property seekers can virtually walk through an e-model of the apartment. “We have built e-models of 1,000 housing projects and we are going to do this for all the housing projects listed on CommonFloor,” Jain says. The founders’ tech moorings are reflected in an augmented reality map-based mobile app to signal available properties in a customer’s vicinity, drones that take pictures of panoramic views from planned high-rise apartments, and systematic photographic verification of properties listed.

“We have zeroed in on what we need to do. Now, we just need to make sure that we do it very fast. And that is why we have gone for this big round of funding. You can expect CommonFloor to be growing fast, fearlessly and fiercely,” Jain tells us.

The need for speed is to consolidate the advantage this tech savyy real estate portal has gained over more traditional sites. Competition in the tech stakes looms from another portal started by IIT graduates, namely Housing.com, which paid a whopping US$1 million for its dot.com domain name, and recently raised another US$19 million in funding.