Home construction marketplace Kolo will use the funding raised in product development, building a new team, and establish a dominant position.
On Thursday, Bengaluru based startup Kolo raised a pre-seed funding round of $500K from Better Capital. Home construction VC Singularity Ventures, and other marquee angel investors, including Ex-GoPay CEO Aldi Haryopratomo, Jiva.ag CPO Aakash, Shopup CEO Sujayath, GSF Founder Rajesh Sawhney, and Ex-Babajobs Founder Vir Kasyap.
Kolo is a social-first digital platform for homeowners to construct their homes. The startup is founded by Southeast Asian unicorn GoJek’s former executives Jery Althaf, Pranav Garg, Aayush Sharda, and Vivek Mittal.
Co-founder of Kolo Jery Althaf, said, “To build a home and make decisions is a social activity. The homeowners get a huge amount of confusion and interact with their family, relatives and service professionals to make decisions about their new home. So we are taking a social-first approach to support the entire home construction journey through Kolo,”
Kolo is filling the gap of making an unorganised construction ecosystem to organised. Apart from homeowners, Kolo provides a host of digital tools to the construction service providers and brands.
“We strongly believe in enabling the existing ecosystem of service providers, brands, and material providers,” said Pranav Garg, Co-Founder of Kolo.
“We got our inspiration when we saw large active Facebook communities formed around home. We were blown away by the hunger we saw there. We also had first-hand intense experiences during construction as both Pranav’s and my families recently constructed new homes,” Jerry added.
Home is a high intent purchase for a majority of Indians who invest a significant amount of their wealth in building their homes.
The company said in most cases, they go through a painful experience of finding the right professionals, designs, materials, and workers in their desired budget, and then hustling with them.
Kolo’s vision is to provide a one-stop destination to help homeowners so that they can build their dream home without the hustle.
“Home is a $200 billion-plus untapped market that suffers from an opaque ecosystem and a broken consumer experience. Kolo’s team, with their experience in building robust digital products at scale, has created a social-first format to lead with consumer experience in re-imagining the construction marketplace in India from the ground up. We are excited to partner with the Kolo team as they unlock this vision,” said Vaibhav Domkundwar of Better Capital, an early backer of social innovators like Kutumb, Turnip, and others.