Crib, an upcoming SaaS-based marketplace for co-living, has raised $400,000 in its pre-seed round led by Pranay Gupta (Co-founder, 91Springboard) through his AngelList syndicate 91Ventures. The round also saw participation from BlackSoil Capital along with marquee angels from Faad Network. Other notable angel investors are Shashwat Nakrani (Co-founder, BharatPe), Jasminder Singh Gulati (Co-founder, Nowfloats, acquired by Jio), Ajay Yadav (Founder, Roomi), Sarath Sura (Ex-Director, Allahabad Bank), Abdul Paravengal (ex-CBO, Shipper), Rahul Jindal (Director, Google), Uday Arya (Partner, BlueLotus Ventures), Panna Lal Bhansali (ex-President, Guwahati Stock Exchange), Kushal Khandwala (Director, KIFS Housing Finance Ltd.), Tushar Anand (Alkem Pharma Family & Founder, Cheferd Foods) and others. The company’s legal counsel Abhay Vohra (Partner, Burgeon Law), CA Anirudh Bagai (Founder, Lawyer2CA) also joined the round.
Headquartered in Gurugram, Crib is building India’s first digital ecosystem aimed at redefining how landlords operate, tenants stay and market sells. Through their SaaS-based marketplace model, Crib is creating a full stack solution for co-living including property management software bundled with a reseller platform. Crib will utilise the current raise to build its engineering team, boost product development and onboard the first set of properties from Bangalore, Pune, Hyderabad, Mumbai and Delhi NCR. The twenty four year old serial entrepreneur duo Sunny Garg and Shaifali Jain successfully built the student housing brand YourShell which was later acquired by Stanza Living.
“When it comes to co-living in India, we always think that it’s the tenant who suffers. Being a tenant, a broker and an operator in the past, we learnt that it’s equally challenging for each stakeholder. While running an asset-heavy business in a competitive landscape, operators face multiple operational challenges. With Crib, we will automate their business processes and enable them to acquire, manage and retain tenants digitally,” said Sunny Garg, Co-founder and CEO at Crib.
Sharing the vision of the brand Shaifali Jain, Co-founder and COO at Crib, said, “This time we are here to create a much larger impact. Our mission is to generate value for every stakeholder of this 93 billion dollar industry through technology, standardisation, and overall growth.”
Expressing his faith in the venture, Ankur Bansal, Co-founder at BlackSoil Capital said, “We believe Crib is well positioned to take advantage of adoption technology by SME and individual proprietors especially in the post-COVID era. It’s an industry with many stakeholders and with friction at every interaction which makes it ripe for disruption through use of technology. On the top of it the Founders come with relevant ground level industry experience and deep understanding of problems faced by all participants in the market. We believe It’s a classic case of vertical use of SaaS.”
“Managed real-estate is a big industry in India which still remains largely untouched by the ease that tech provides. We feel Crib can make the job of the owners to manage multiple tenants and multiple properties really simple and ensure that users get a top class experience. Sunny and Shaifali have the experience of running a co-living business and have deep insights about the pains of both; property owners and tenants. Hence, we feel they are best placed to create and sell a product like this,” said Pranay Gupta, Co-founder at 91Springboard.