Indian real estate advisory startup Square Yards has announced its merger with online search and discovery platform Realizing.in. The financial details of the deal is not disclosed, though it is believed to be in the vicinity of $5 million. The combined entity is now targeting a 15% market share in a couple of years.
As a part of the deal, two co-founders of the company, Vivek Agarwal and Hitesh Singla will join Square Yards as partners of executive committee. They will lead product platform and research capabilities at Square Yards.
Along with them, the entire team of Realizing will join Square Yards. This will increase the employee count of the company to around 700 compared from current 650.
With this acquisition, Square Yards is now aiming to grow stronger for the leading position in the market. It is looking forward to achieve 15% of the market share in coming years. It will be named under Square Yards and will continue to build research and knowledge capital capabilities under the Realizing brand to become a big data analytics platform for global real estate.
Realizing.in was founded in 2013 by Rohit Raghav, Hitesh Kumar Singla and Vivek Agarwal. It has created intellectual property along with unique innovations in property portals like interactive city heat-maps, carpet area & built-up area calculations, need based recommendation engine, price to size scatter plot and property decision drivers.
Gurgaon-based Square Yards was founded in 2013, and is a part of India’s surging online real estate discovery market, which has seen numerous startups attracting decent investments. It has presence in over 20 cities spanning across 5 countries. It recently raised $6 million in a pre-Series A round of funding from a group of angel investors.
Commenting on merger, Square Yards’s CEO and co-founder, Tanuj Shori said,
We are very excited to bring in the expertise of Realizing.in team to merge with the strong execution capability of Square Yards. With Square Yards already leading the transactional space having become leading pan India player in just 18 months since start up, pseudo monopoly in NRI markets, and having transacted USD350mn worth of real estate since start of its operations; the joining of Realizing team adds the much needed technology bandwidth to achieve larger scale.
Vivek Agarwal, CEO & co founder, Realizing.in, said,
We believe beyond complimentary skill sets across the value chain, it is the common vision and belief to lead end to end capabilities that brought us together. We were amazed by global execution capabilities of Square Yards and its growth story – the fact that they have become number one in such a short time and are clocking more revenues than any other online or organized offline player in India.
In recent times, online real estate in India has witnessed many notablet investments and acquisitions. Housing.com recently acquired risk assessment firm Realty Business Intelligence. Prior to that, it acquired Indian Real Estate Forum for $1.2 million. In April, PropTiger.com acquired OoBi and then took over Makaan.com in one of the biggest ad most talked about acquisitions of an age old pioneer by a new-age startup.
