Bangalore-based, home construction marketplace Kolo on Wednesday said it has raised USD 550K in a pre-seed funding round led by Better Capital. The round also saw the participation of Home construction VC – Singularity Ventures and other marquee angel investors including Ex-GoPay CEO Aldi Haryopratomo, Jiva.ag CPO Aakash, Shopup CEO Sujayath, GSF founder Rajesh Sawhney, and Ex-Babajobs founder Vir Kasyap.
The four co-founders Jery Althaf, Pranav Garg, Aayush Sharda & Vivek Mittal had worked together at GoJEK, the Southeast Asian unicorn.
Home is a high intent purchase and, in most cases, a once-in-a-lifetime purchase for a majority of Indians who invest a significant amount of their wealth with a lot of passion in building their homes. However, in most cases, they go through a painful experience of finding the right professionals, designs, materials and workers in their desired budget, and then hustling with them. Kolo’s vision is to provide a one-stop destination to help homeowners so that they can build their dream home without hustle.
“We found that decision-making in home construction is inherently a ‘social’ activity. The homeowners go through huge volumes of content and interact with their family, relatives, and service professionals to make decisions about their ‘Dream home’. So we are taking a social-first approach to support the entire home construction journey through Kolo.” said Jery Althaf, Co-Founder of Kolo.
“We got our inspiration when we saw large active Facebook communities formed around home. We were blown away by the hunger we saw there. We also had first-hand intense experiences during construction closely as both Pranav’s and my families recently constructed our new homes.” he added.
Kolo wants to streamline this unorganized construction ecosystem. Besides just to homeowners, Kolo provides a host of digital tools to the construction service providers and brands. “We strongly believe in enabling the existing ecosystem of service providers, brands, and material providers,” said Pranav Garg, Co-Founder of Kolo.
“Home is a $200B+ untapped market that suffers from an opaque ecosystem and a broken consumer experience. Kolo’s team, with their experience in building robust digital products at scale, has created a social-first format to lead with consumer experience in re-imagining the construction marketplace in India from the ground up. We are excited to partner with the Kolo team as they unlock this vision & have been massively impressed with the week-on-week growth they’ve delivered”, said Vaibhav Domkundwar of Better Capital, an early backer of social innovators like Kutumb, Turnip & others.
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Kolo’s team says they have grown 5x in the last 2 months. “We are seeing strong engagement among homeowners and service professionals and have received a lot of interest for paid products from service professionals although we don’t offer paid products at the moment,” said Jery.
Kolo will use the funds for building the initial team, product development, and establishing a dominant position in the first few markets in India.
