New Delhi: Home rental startup FastFox has raised Rs 30 crore in a Series A funding round from Lightspeed India Partners, the India-specific fund of US-based Lightspeed Venture Partners, Blume Ventures and CyberAgent Ventures.

The company plans to invest the money in improving its technology solution, developing service delivery model and expanding the team across engineering, sales and operations.

“We are already the largest player in Gurgaon and aim to be the largest rental brokerage in India in the next few years,” said Pallav Pandey, Co-Founder and CEO, FastFox.

The company provides home rental brokerage services in Gurgaon and plans to expand to Noida, Pune, Bangalore and Mumbai in the next 12 months.

“Pallav and his team have shown us that there is a large market in rentals that suffers from India-specific problems such as information scarcity, information asymmetry, trust deficits and small local networks, all of which can be solved through the power of the Internet and a tech-enabled approach like Fastfox.com,” said Dev Khare, Partner at Lightspeed India Partners Advisors.

Realty-focused IT firm Oku Tech, FastFox’s parent company, which also runs another property broker networking application BroEx, had raised an early-stage funding of around Rs 6.4 crore from Lightspeed India Partners in 2015.

“We believe that, similar to China, the future of real estate brokerage in India is not in removing the brokers but by making the service trusted and professional,” said Sajid Fazalbhoy, Principal at Blume Ventures.

Oku Tech, the Gurgaon-based company founded in 2014 by Pandey and Mukul Bhati, early last year acquired an independent broker company Professional Brokers and renamed the new entity as FastFox. The company which claims to represent customers, charges 15 days brokerage fees for its services.

Source: Economic Times