Home rental startup NestAway buys rival Zenify

Home rental startup NestAway Technologies has acquired Bangalore-based home aggregator and rental management company Zenify for an undisclosed amount, the company said on Sunday.

“We hope to disrupt and restructure the social infrastructure of housing for both singles and families in times to come,” Amarendra Sahu, co-founder and chief executive at NestAway, said in a statement.

Notably, Zenify will continue to operate as a separate entity after the acquisition and will add to the family rentals business started by NestAway in April 2016.

NestAway, founded in 2015 by Sahu, Smruti Parida, Deepak Dhar and Jitendra Jagadev, started out as an aggregator of shared, furnished apartments for bachelors. It later added full homes for families too. The startup manages a homeowner’s rental property throughout the rental life cycle, from showing the house to a prospective tenant to closing the rental agreement and collecting the rent. They charge a certain percentage of the monthly rent it generates from the house as commission.

The platform has close to 1,000 family properties listed on it out of the 10,000-plus homes under management across eight cities in India. The company, backed by Tiger Global, Yuri Milner, and others, has raised $43 million so far and is in the market to raise a $30 million round.

“With the coming together of the two biggest players in the real estate services segment, we will leap ahead of the competition. By making the entire system transparent and value driven, and with a strong underlying philosophy of homes that do not discriminate, NestAway and Zenify will work together to create a strong home rental ecosystem in India,” Agarwal, co-founder at Zenify said in a statement.

Zenify, founded in 2012 by Sudarshan Purohit, Kailash Rathi and Ankur Agarwal, has so far raised about Rs 11 crore.