Fully furnished homes rental service, Fella Homes, announced today that it will be acquiring LifePad along with its network of homes and its team based out of Noida, in an all cash deal. This will enable Fella Homes to quickly expand its network of homes and establish multi-city presence. Post the acquisition, Fella Homes will now be present in Gurgaon & Noida. LifePad customers will also gain access to a larger network of homes to chose from. After the acquisition, LifePad homes will be renamed as Fella Homes and will be managed under the same banner.
About LifePad Noida-based LifePad was founded by IIM alumni and former BCG consultants, Piyush Bhartiya and Rachit Agrawal in 2015 and got seed funded in March 2016. LifePad provides fully furnished, yet affordable living experience to young professionals and helps home owners rent out their apartments at the same time.
About Fella Homes Fella Homes is a next-gen property management company, founded by IIT Roorkee & Stanford alumni - Virender Pratap Singh, Yadwinder Paul Singh, Digendra Singh Rathore, Kunal Singh & Amit Gupta in 2015. They aim to provide a smart and hassle free lifestyle to each and everyone. With a strong team of over 50 employees, Fella Homes is creating a residential renting platform to simplify the house hunt process. Fella Homes have raised a seed funding of $2 million in early 2016 from an undisclosed investor.
Way ahead:After an exciting yet challenging 9 months journey, the co-founders now plan to take a short break before working on the next venture. Rachit Agrawal mentioned "We would take some time to analyze our decisions, performance and learnings before jumping on to next venture. Lifepad was a great experience but it's important to take feedbacks and analyze your strengthens and weaknesses".
After launching in Noida, Fella Homes is planning to launch its operations in Bangalore, Pune and Hyderabad by end of this year. They are also looking to hire people across all verticals to grow it's size from 60 to 150 member strong team. Currently they have 100+ properties and are looking to grow 2.5 times while serving 400+ customers and are looking to grow 10 times by March 2017.
Overall Market"House rental market is said to be worth ~$30 billion market and still has huge gap unmet. All major cities witness thousands and lakhs of people coming every year. Helping a home seeker in finding a furnished house and managing the experience post move-in holds the key. As it's an operationally challenging task, to succeed in this market one has to optimize the operations through technology" says Rachit.
The only significant competitor with a similar revenue model is Bengaluru-based NestAway, which recently raised $30 million in funding in a Series C round led by Tiger Global, Russian billionaire Yuri Milner and IDG Ventures India and Mr. Ratan Tata.
