Ratan Tata-backed company, once valued at Rs 1,800 crore, sells at just Rs 90 crore

Ratan Tata-backed proptech startup NestAway Technologies Pvt. has been sold for just Rs 90 crore. It is a Bengaluru-based online home rental startup which has now been acquired by listed firm Aurum PropTech Ltd. with a huge 95% cut, according to an exchange filing. In 2019, NestAway was valued at around Rs 1,800 crore. But now it has been sold with a steep cut.

Aurum will now further invest Rs 30 crore to stabilise NestAway, the filing said. Last year in June 2022, Aurum PropTech acquired HelloWorld, a co-living space operator, from NestAway. "After successfully scaling up HelloWorld’s operations within a year, Aurum PropTech has strategically acquired NestAway. The founders of HelloWorld, Jitendra Jagadev and Ismail Khan, who were originally part of the founding team at NestAway, will now lead NestAway post-acquisition," it said.

NestAway was founded by Amarendra Sahu, Deepak Dhar, and Smruti Parida in 2015. It raised close to USD 110 million at a valuation of USD 225 million in its last funding round in 2019. However, its business crumbled during the Covid-19 pandemic. Lockdowns and reverse migration led people to leave their rented homes to move back to their hometowns.

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Before the Covid pandemic, the company featured 50,000 properties on its platform. It achieved an annualised revenue of Rs 100 crore then. However, currently, the number has fallen to just 18,000 properties with an annualised revenue of Rs 30 crore.

NestAway has cumulatively raised around Rs 900 crore from marquee investors such as Tiger Global and the UC-RNT Fund, which is a joint venture between Tata Sons chairman emeritus Ratan Tata's RNT Associates and the University of California.