Easy Home Finance Raises Funds from Harbourfront Capital
Mortgage-Tech company Easy Home Finance, which is registered under the National Housing Bank, has entered into a partnership with Harbourfront Capital, a group company of Das Capital, specialising in asset investment in emerging platforms. Harbourfront capital has infused an undisclosed amount into the company, and Easy will be utilizing the funds in expanding its assets under management base and further investment in technology. With this partnership, Harbourtfront Group along with Easy Group intends to enter into a variety of financial services verticals in India.
Easy is a Mumbai based financial services company, founded by a team of ex-professionals with decades of experience in the BFSI Sectors with Mr. Debabrata Sarkar, Ex-Chairman, Union Bank of India as the chairman of the board of directors. Currently the company is registered under the National Housing Bank Act as a HFC and is targeting the PMAY-CLSS backed affordable housing segments across several cities.
Seeing the demand of affordable housing for middle income underserved segment of the population, the company intends to serve the segment with a paperless journey for the consumer. The company has developed its own proprietary AI-based technology that includes onboarding, assessing and management of the home loans. Easy has been rapidly growing in the past year and is focussed on providing home loans to the first home buyer and women as co-owners in tier-2 and tier-3 cities across India.
Easy aims to use the raised funds to grow its AUM to 10x in the next 1 year. The company will also launch its Platform as a service (PaaS) in the next financial year, where it hopes to work with co-lenders for plugging in the demand-supply gap in the market.
Shinji Kimura, Founder of Harbourfront commented “We believe Easy Home Finance is in the best position to benefit from the country’s ongoing reform of the real estate finance market, underpinned by the rising demand for properties. Also, we have no doubt Easy has amazing board members with global reach and a proven commitment to innovation and value creation. We are truly thrilled to participate in their journey as a strategic partner and look forward to working together to play a role in the country’s economic transformation”.
Rohit Chokhani, Founder & Managing Director of Easy, said, “The partnership with HarbourFront is the beginning of a long standing relationship between the two entities which reiterates Japanese & Indian companies successful history. There has been much negative sentiment in the market surrounding NBFC's / HFC's but in the recent budget the government has recognised that financial institutions play an extremely important role in the economy. Investors across the globe realise the opportunity of India's fastest growing industry, we hope that the domestic banks support companies which are working tirelessly on the grass-root level to make the Prime Minister’s dream come true for Housing for all by 2022.”
On the prospects of Mortgage-tech Mr. Praveen Agrawal (Ex-SIDBI), CEO of Easy said, “Getting a home loan has always been a challenging experience for millions of people, with our extensive data backed AI based approach, with our Easy Platform we are set to change mortgage-lending across India and will expand to other Asian countries in the near future.”
The mortgage-tech sector in India is relatively untapped, the current landscape includes Software products, while it is estimated that most housing finance companies and banks use fragmented loan origination and loan management systems. While companies like Rocket Mortgage and Better Mortgage are present in the USA, the developing Asian countries demand is distinctive as it is based mostly on combination of formal & informal income.
