Kolo Raises $550,000 Pre-Seed Round Led By Better Capital The startup will use the funds for building the initial team, product development, and establishing a dominant position in the first few markets in India
By Prabhjeet Bhatla •
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Bengaluru-based Kolo—a home construction marketplace that provides a social-first digital platform for homeowners to construct their homes—on Thursday announced raising $550,000 in a pre-Seed funding round led by Better Capital. Home construction VC - Singularity Ventures and other angel investors including Aldi Haryopratomo, Jiva.ag chief procurement officer Aakash, Shopup chief executive officer Sujayath, GSF founder Rajesh Sawhney, and Vir Kasyap also participated in the round.
The startup will use the funds for building the initial team, product development, and establishing a dominant position in the first few markets in India.
"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, Kolo. We got our inspiration when we saw large active Facebook communities formed around the 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. 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."
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, the company said.
"We strongly believe in enabling the existing ecosystem of service providers, brands, and material providers," shared Pranav Garg, co-founder, Kolo.
Kolo wants to streamline this unorganized construction ecosystem. Besides just to homeowners, the platform provides a host of digital tools to the construction service providers and brands.
"Home is a $200 billion 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 the 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 and have been massively impressed with the week-on-week growth they've delivered," added Vaibhav Domkundwar, chief executive officer and founder, Better Capital.
Kolo has been said to have grown fivefold in the last two months.
