Bengaluru-based home rental startup, NestAway Technologies, announced that it has raised Rs 330 crore (approximately $51 million) in a Series D round of funding. The round witnessed participation by prominent investors including Goldman Sachs and UC-RNT Fund, a joint venture by Ratan Tata’s RNT Associates and the University of California.

According to sources familiar with the transaction, the startup’s existing investors, IDG India and Tiger Global also participated in the funding round, with the latter having invested between $5-8 million. As per the startup’s co-founder, Amarendra Sahu, the capital raised will be used to fund the startup’s expansion into newer segments.

The deal is one of the largest rounds of funding led by financial investors in the consumer –facing startup segment, in the past one year. For quite some time, the space has only seen huge players like Japan’s Softbank and China’s Alibaba and Tencent becoming the main financiers.

“NestAway is at the forefront of using technology and a hands-on, customer-centric approach to solving complex housing market problems in India’s largest cities,” said Niladri Mukhopadhyay, managing director at Goldman Sachs.

NestAway was founded in 2015 by Amarendra Sahu , Smruti Parida, Deepak Dhar and Jitendra Jagadev. The startup is a digital marketplace for home rentals that converts unfurnished houses into fully furnished and managed apartments and rents them out to pre-verified tenants.

The Bengaluru based startup has become a top residential property manager in the country, currently handling a total of 13 million sq-ft of rental space. It is likely to be valued at $ 200 million, after the latest investment, which will make NestAway one of the well-funded and valued startups in the co-living market segment in the country.

Prior to this round, the startup had previously raised $ 45 million from well-known investors including the Indian e-commerce giant, Flipkart. The startup has a tenant base of 35,000 across 10 cities including Bengaluru, Delhi, Mumbai, Faridabad, and Ghaziabad and is aiming to scale up its tenant base to 100,000 over the next 12 months.

In May 2017, NestAway acquired Zenify, a purchase that has allowed the startup to foray into the family rental solutions business. Currently, it has over 7,000 ‘family owners’ on its platform.

Furthermore, the startup is aiming to expand into newer segments of community living, managing homes of NRIs and enter the student accommodation arena, where its main competitors will be Stanza living, Yourspace, Campusville, and Coho Dorms.The NRI space, however, is viewed as a potential market of 1 million homes in the top metropolitan cities of the country.

According to industry estimates, the residential rental market in the country is valued at $18 billion-$20 billion, while the student accommodation market is valued at $10 million. However, to enter the student accommodation market, NestAway will begin by establishing its presence in Pune and North Campus Area in New Delhi. The industry experts and investors, however, maintain that the development of infrastructure across major education hubs is a challenging task, with safety, hygiene, a regulatory framework and affordability being the key issues in the sphere.

“We want to create comfort, transparency and affordability for everyone who is moving homes, like personnel in the army don’t have to worry about where they live when they are transferred,” said Amarendra Sahu, Co-founder and CEO of NestAway. “With this funding, we shall work on community housing and student housing in addition to our existing categories.”

(Picture courtesy: NestAway)