BuildSupply, a proptech startup owned by and a trademark of Archer Technologies Pvt Ltd, today announced securing a Pre-series A financing round led by Japanese Tech Venture fund, Gree Ventures. The round also saw participation from Venture Highway, a fund advised by Niraj Arora, Global Head of Business at WhatsApp, Sonny Kalsi, Founder at GreenOak Real Estate and other industry names like Kalpesh Mehta, Rohit Srivastava and Sameer Brij Verma of Nexus Partners.
Founded by Sameer Nayar (ex-Head of Credit Suisse Real Estate, Asia-Pac), Nipun Yadvinder and Sarit Sethi in April 2016, BuildSupply is looking to bring about standardisation and transparency to the Real Estate Development and Construction processes. The company claims to have India’s most advanced ERP system for the industry. They offer easy-to-adopt, functional solutions and have a clientele that includes Godrej Properties Limited, SARE Homes and Nelson India.
The proptech company plans to utilise the funds to expand their product and tech team while establishing a base across major metros.
“Real Estate and Construction is one of the largest industries in India with a tremendous multiplier effect. The government intends to dramatically increase the scale and size of affordable housing, smart cities and general infrastructure. Our product allows for companies to create tremendous scale and operational efficiency. It can help create cost savings of 8-10% in a single project” Said Sameer Nayar, the Founder.
India is a globally high lucrative market for construction, despite which real estate developers in the country – both private and public – face issue of cost estimation, vendor management and transparent procuring. “BuildSupply’s solution is coming at an opportune time, leveraging on the GST and RERA frameworks, to solve these key challenges for the industry,” Nikhil Kapur, Senior Investment Manager at Gree said.
As per a statement from BuildSupply, 53% of real estate leaders globally ranked themselves at five or less on digital and innovation maturity, where zero indicates being well behind the curve and 10 at the cutting edge. Only 13% consider themselves to be at the cutting edge of proptech, thereby revealing a significant opportunity for companies like BuildSupply to introduce improvements, standardisation and transparency. As per a survey that the proptech startup conducted with over 100 companies internally, only around half had ever engaged with software solutions and less than 15% were using them on an ongoing basis. The results indicated that the Indian market is slow to adapt new technologies in the $150 billion a year market segment.
