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House hunting in an unknown city like Delhi or Mumbai, has always been the most difficult task if asked.
This is where NestAway Technologies Pvt. Ltd, a startup providing rented houses, found its space to grow. NestAway has become a well known online brand for providing furnished, unfurnished, semi furnished houses for bachelors, families and working women at affordable prices while removing the only pain area in house hunting i.e. the broker.
How it started
Founded in January 2014 by four alumni of National Institute of Technology Surathkal, Amarendra Sahu, Jitendra Jagadev, Smruti Ranjan Parida and Deepak Dhar created this online platform to solve the problems for working youth basically, who were facing difficulties of finding a suitable and affordable place to live in metro cities.
Deepak Dhar, one of the Co-founders, NestAway, said, "When we started off, it was a new concept for owners and a solution for tenants. Plus we were solving the youth housing crisis of upwardly mobile urban migrants in cities."
The idea came in when they saw that their cousins and friends faced the same difficulties as them when they stepped out of their homes for jobs and studies.
Achievements
NestAway currently caters to over 35,000 tenants and 16,000 owners, including over 7,000 family owners in Bangalore, Delhi, Faridabad, Ghaziabad, Greater Noida, Gurgaon, Hyderabad, Noida, Mumbai, and Pune.
Recently NestAway Technologies Pvt. Ltd has raised $51 million (Rs 330 crore) in series D financing from Goldman Sachs, UC-RNT Fund, and Schroder Adveq. With the latest round of funding, NestAway has raised nearly $100 million from Tiger Global, IDG Ventures, Ratan Tata, Yuri Milner and Goldman Sachs.
Future Plans
In conversation with Dhar, he said that “Right now we are planning to focus on student housing in Kota and we plan to onboard one million tenants in next five years. Other than this we plan to invest the investment in strengthening the backend and in building a strong database.”
NestAway is planning to roll out the student housing services from mid-July starting from Kota, Rajasthan and then they plan to move to Delhi, Pune and Bangalore, where a huge population of students flocks in from tier II and tier III cities every year.
NestAway is also planning to introduce ‘Smart Homes’ by launching the Smart Lock service for all homes. Smart Lock is a safety locking system that will ensure security for people staying in NestAway homes and especially for women. This service will be available on the NestAway app on both Android & iOS devices.
Dealing with Competition
When asked about dealing with competitors, Dhar said that “It is not easy to just copy the idea unless you invest your time, interest and energy in making it the best. In NestAway we are dedicated and passionate about the kind the service we provide, and that is what makes it a unique experience for the customers, which helps in building trust with the company and its services.”
He explained with a smile that, “We are not worried at all as there is enough space for everyone to grow. Moreover, we believe we have established that trust among our customers that their first choice will always be NestAway unless the location falls out of our radar. Also, we are working on keeping that trust strong as ever by providing more than what they expect which fits their pocket and heart.”
