Buildzar Raises $4 Million From Individual Investor Puneet Dalmia

NEW DELHI, January 27, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Buildzar.com, India's largest marketplace for home construction and home renovation, has announced receiving $4 million from individual investor Puneet Dalmia in pre-series A funding. This consumer-Internet platform caters to individual home builders, apartment owners and small and medium sized builders and contractors. Offering end-to-end 'turnkey' solutions including design, labor services and materials, Buildzar.com aims to concretize its position as the de-facto platform for all home building related products and services by leveraging technology and offering productized solutions to its consumers.

Buildzar.com offers a comprehensive bouquet of products and services under two verticals: The Material Store - a marketplace having over 20,000 products related to civil, electrical, plumbing, paints, flooring, kitchen bathroom etc. and BuildMyHome - a curated platform for design and contracting services with over 70 contractors and architects on its platform.

In the $150 billion individual home construction market, 30,000 new houses are constructed every year in Delhi NCR itself, where the average cost of building a house ranges between INR 6 million - 100 million. The market, however, is largely fragmented and remains marred with basic issues of trust and quality. Having faced such problems while building their own homes, Vineet Singh and Puneet Dalmia felt the need to simplify the process of building a home for the commoner. The first innovation at Buildzar was their estimation tool Beztimate, which solves the foremost problem of the consumer - clarity on construction cost, time, and quantity of material, which Beztimate provides in one click. Buildzar came up with several other innovations in its Material Store, offerings like organizing the entire store by budget, bundling of products as per construction stage into 'Combos', and selling the entire Bill of Materials (BOM) rather than selling individual SKUs. In the recently-launched BuildMyHome , Buildzar offers hassle-free building and renovation experience to the consumer by providing end-to-end design, supply and build solutions through qualified and professional service providers, standardized rates and service level agreements (SLAs), guaranteed-adherence to project cost and timelines, and warranties up to seven years. The team is developing project management tool, through which a home builder can monitor all her construction-related metrics like cost-incurred, projected completion timelines, inventory etc. on a real-time basis and can also receive live feeds, alerts and updates on his project.

Talking about the venture, Vineet Singh, Co-Founder, CEO & MD, Buildzar.com said, "Building a home is perhaps the longest and highest value transaction in an individual's lifetime. The fact that the new age customer is younger, Internet-savvy, and is willing to pay for standardization and quality, makes this business even more exciting for us. Our vision is to give consumer the power to manage a complex thing like construction, using only their mobile phone."

Talking about the latest round of funding, anchor investor Puneet Dalmia, MD & CEO Dalmia Cement Bharat Ltd, said, "Buildzar.com is leading the market with little competition when it comes to the kind of services and product portfolio it provides. It has etched out a clear path to profitability on the back of its first mover advantage, an outstanding team, asset-light operations and a revenue-focused approach. With its promise of 100% guaranteed quality at best prices, and a strong consumer focus, Buildzar is pegged to resolve the pain points in the construction services industry in India through its unique O2O (online-to-offline) model."

Buildzar is live on desktop and mobile through its Android and iOS app. It is already clocking 750-800 orders on a monthly basis since the beginning of its operations in September 2015, with steel and cement being the leading categories. With an integrated effort to scale higher margins through its turnkey solutions and acquire market share through full stack of products, Buildzar is poised to create an indisputable dominance in a market that has been barely tapped in the e-commerce domain. While the company's current focus is on consolidating the business in the Delhi NCR region, which alone is valued at $9-10 billion, in the next 6 months it aims to expand their operations across southern markets starting with Bangalore, Chennai and Hyderabad.

About Buildzar:  

Buildzar.com is a Gurgaon-based consumer Internet startup, founded with the aim of using technology and productized solution to solve pain points of constructing a home or renovating a home or apartment. The co-founders include Vineet Singh, ex-business head of 99acres.com and an experienced Internet professional, Swapnil Tripathi, ex-Head Consumer Operations at Goibibo and a former entrepreneur, and Vivek Sinha, ISB Hyderabad alumnus and a construction industry professional. The management team consists of fair mix of professionals from consumer Internet, building materials industry, and construction, with pedigree from top schools including MIT, Stanford, ISB, IIMs and IITs. The business started operations in September 2015 with its building materials marketplace, and then launched the 'Turnkey Solutions' platform in December 2015. The business has already clocked a GSV (Gross Sales Value) of INR 75 million, and is helping over 600 consumers across Delhi NCR build their dream homes.

Website: http://www.buildzar.com/

Media Contact:
Pooja Bharadwaj
[email protected]
+91-9560166999
Senior Manager
Dalmia Bharat Group