In Startup50 2016: For establishing scale within two years of founding. It currently enables over five lakh C2C transactions every month and has 10 lakh registered users

Founders: Akhil Gupta, Amit Kumar Agarwal, Saurabh Garg

A striking differentiator for NoBroker, launched in early 2014, happens to be its use of technology to eliminate brokers in the process of buying, selling or renting real estate, and becoming successful at that. “Brokers have penetrated themselves into almost every real estate transaction in the country. They often demand a two month brokerage (one month each from owner and tenant) for just a 11 month rental agreement and that’s a hefty sum,” claim its founders.

The company, so far, has grown 20 times in the past one year, across website visitors, registered users and new property listings, and claims to have 25 lakh website visitors across its desktop & mobile app every month.

Fuelling The Change

So, how does it ensure authenticity of listings on the platform? At the early stage itself, the company has developed a proprietary algorithm to scan the owner and the buyer’s social footprint within two minutes of their registering on the platform. While it began as a free portal for both owners and buyers, it has now entered into a subscription-based model, and also gives the customer an option of seeking a relationship manager to assist in property buying or selling, and view the number of clicks, views and ratings on a property to make informed decisions.

The Money Game

With over 180 employees currently on board, the company has recently (in November 2016) raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Paytm’s Vijay Shekar Sharma. Earlier, it had raised a total of US $13 million over two rounds, from a string of notable investors such as SAIF Partners, BEENEXT, Digital Garage, BEENOS, Qualgro, Mr. Mamoru Taniya of Asuka holdings & Fulcrum Ventures.

Owing to its model of eliminating the middlemen in real estate, in September 2015, the office was attacked by a mob of brokers who claimed that the model was robbing them of their livelihood.

Incidentally, NoBroker claims to have saved more than Rs. 250 crore of brokerage till date.