Exclusive: Kolabro gets angel funding from Gaadi.com's Kumar, CollegeDekho's Arora

Kolabro, a technology platform for real estate brokers, has raised an undisclosed amount in angel funding from Gaadi.com's founder Umang Kumar and CollegeDekho's co-founder Ruchir Arora, besides other investors.

The startup would use the money to strengthen its technology backbone and marketing capabilities and expand into more cities, Biju Menon, co-founder of Gurgaon-based Kolabro Business Solutions Pvt Ltd, told Techcircle.in.

"For brokers, we are a great way of staying relevant in an industry where well-funded, large format broking firms have been posing a threat to small brokers. Also, this model gives a voice to the consumer which was much needed in this industry," said Menon.

The company is also in talks to raise pre-Series A funding from a bunch of investors including Ankush Nijhawan, Gaurav Bhatnagar and Manish Dhingra.

An O2O platform, Kolabro integrates CRM and lead management/generation capabilities while allowing brokers to interact with peers. The startup, which was founded in January by Menon and Dinesh Gadge, tries to leverage the expertise of real estate brokers to facilitate on-ground transactions.

Kolabro currently facilitates primary market real estate transactions only; it will venture into the secondary market by mid-2016.

Presently, about 5,000 brokers from Delhi NCR are on the Kolabro platform. It has facilitated transactions worth Rs 16 crore since inception, Menon claims. The Kolabro app is available on the Play Store.

Gadge, an alumnus of IIT Bombay and IIM Bangalore, was heading the product function at Gaadi.com before starting Kolabro. On the other hand, Menon headed digital advertising for Lintas. He had started his own broking business in 2012.

In the last 12 months, several broker-focused tech startups have emerged in the real estate space. While some tech players dole out social networking capabilities, others provide an end-to-end business management platform for brokers. Indeed, some of these ventures have caught investors' attention.

In September, Plabro Networks Pvt Ltd, a mobile-only commercial networking platform for real estate agents, secured $350,000 (Rs 2.3 crore) in its first round of funding from a group of investors including Flipkart co-founders Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal.

Sunday Realty Solutions, which operates a listings and customer relationship management platform for real estate agents, raised Rs 5 crore ($785,000) in early stage funding four months ago from IPAL Fund Managers' Ramesh Jogani and Shailesh Viswanathan.

In July, multiple listing online platform for real estate brokers IndiaMLS received seed funding of $1.09 million (Rs 7 crore) from a group of high net-worth individuals, including Mumbai-based real estate businessman Dhaval Bharot.

In the same month, Gurgaon-based Oku Tech Pvt Ltd, which operates collaboration platform for brokers BroEx, raised $1 million (Rs 6.4 crore) in seed funding from Lightspeed India.