Amber, the leading global student housing platform, executed 1000% growth in team size and operations, securing the leading spot in the market with a gross booking value of $600M by 2022.
More than 232 million students worldwide are looking for accommodation near their schools and universities. However, far fewer students find housing well within budget and matching their requirements.
“If finding a place to stay can be so difficult and expensive in a city like Mumbai, imagine the struggle students must face finding one across borders,” said Saurabh Goel, IIT KGP alumni, Founder and CEO of Amber. “Our friends’ struggling with student accommodation were the real eye-openers to a growing problem in the student housing market.”
Thus, two IIT KGP graduates, former batchmates and now co-founders, Saurabh Goel and Madhur Gujar launched amber in 2016. Born out of Google forms and Facebook groups, amber quickly grew as one of the world’s largest leading student accommodation platforms.
In only six years, the company revamped the student rental space, grew into a 400-member team, made $600 million in gross booking value with a 40% net margin, and carved a large presence in the global real estate market. Showing no signs of slowing down, the team tripled gross booking values even during the pandemic.
“There is no one man or one brain behind this success,” beamed Madhur Gujar, co-founder and Chief Business Officer. “The strategy is very simple – you have to have a great team with a vision for growth. So we decided to onboard the best minds in the country, built a solid team, and pushed through any hurdles the market threw at us. The last couple of years were especially tough for the industry, but we made it through simply because of the resilience and focus our team brought to the table.”
Keeping with the momentum of growth and expansion, the team wants to scale to 100,000 bookings with a gross value of $1 billion by 2023. As a disruptor of the student rental landscape, it would be interesting to see how things evolve.
Amber is a leading global student housing platform, providing affordable housing options to students in more than 100 cities across the UK, US, Australia, and Ireland, with more than 1 MM beds on the platform. The company was launched in 2016 in Pune, Maharashtra, to offer cross-border students an easy house-hunting experience without the hassle of negotiations, credit scores, non-standardised paperwork, and broken payment processes. As a one-click platform, the company provides the comfort of secure online search, and 24/7 free and personalized customer service in locating the ideal student accommodation.
