NestAway, a Bangalore-based online home rental startup, has secured around ₹330 crore ($50 million) in its new funding round from Ratan Tata’s UC-RNT Fund. Existing investors of the company — Tiger Global and IDG Ventures India have also participated in the current round.
As per the reports, the company is still in talks with more investors. If more investors come onboard, the amount raised in the round could stand at about $80 million. Fosun International, a China-based investors is said to be talks with the company, among others.
The investment will reportedly value NestAway between $180 million and $200 million. However, neither the investors mentioned above nor the destination company NestAway has officially confirmed any of these.
The startup was founded by Sahu, Dhar, Smruti Parida and Jitendra Jagadev in January 2015. It turns ‘for-rent’ apartments into managed, fully-furnished houses and provides them to pre-verified tenants.
NestAway offers property management services, where owners of properties can leave it to them to handle the upkeep and maintenance of the property while the property is being rented out.
Out of the monthly rentals collected, NestAway retains 10-12% commission and remit the rest to the owner of the property. Neither the property owner nor the tenant has to pay any other fee, like the conventional brokerage, to NestAway.
According to the company, it has around 15,000 such properties already under its belt clocking a gross rental collection of ₹350 crores. The properties are spread over 8 cities.
UC-RNT Fund is a join investment fund between Tata Sons Ltd chairman emeritus Ratan Tata and the University of California. For the UC-RNT, this investment in NestAway marks its fourth investment so far.