Venture Catalysts, an integrated incubation recently facilitated an undisclosed amount of investment into a fintech startup HomeCapital, focussed on home down-payment assistance to fist time home buyers.
The funding was led by VCats angels Anuj Golecha, Gaurav Gandhi, Ram Joukani, Gaurav Singhvi, Vishal Jhunjhunwaala, Anudeep Jhunjhunwaala, Brijesh Thakkar, Revathi Roy, Jagidsh Gothi, Dipan Dalal, and others.
HomeCapital creates home-ownership opportunities for first time homebuyers through down payment assistance to accelerate their home buying at zero interest rate through innovative financial structuring.
Founded by IIM Calcutta alumnus, Lalit Menghani, HomeCapital has defined a completely new and strategic market segment for first time home buyers. The market space is uncontested and the founder's years has rich experience in finance and real estate domain working for Milestone Capital, Elara Capital, Standard Chartered and Crisil. It currently has a huge market opportunity, catering to 75 percent of the supply in residential real estate across Delhi-NCR, MMR, Bangalore, Pune, and Chennai. The business model is highly scalable and asset light.
HomeCapital's offering has the potential to influence the market, increasing the demand of housing requirements in the future and being the only company to provide complete assistance in its category of down-payment assistance at zero interest. Furthermore, it has started entering into deliberations and partnership talks with leading financial institutions and housing finance companies that will give Home Capital a pan-Indian presence quickly.
"The biggest challenge that first time home buyers face in the Indian housing market is the lack of savings for home down payment. A sizeable amount of savings is required while buying a home and an average salaried person does not always have such significant amount of savings. We wanted to solve this massive problem by providing users with interest free down payment assistance to meet home down payment requirements. The funds secured in this round will help us to develop our brand, scale up our current infrastructure and enhance our product besides entering into strategic tie-ups with financial partners to emerge as every home buyer's preferred destination for meeting their down payment needs," said Lalit.
While the problem of providing down payments for homes was always present, the sector has remained without any facilitators or financial assistance providers. This provides Home Capital with a first-mover advantage.
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"HomeCapital has a brilliant concept with negligible competitors and great demand which ensures its long-term sustainability. The founder's experience in the complex Indian real estate sector helps drive a unique business model that addresses the core problem of home buyers, which is affordability. I am extremely confident of its success and it can very well emerge to be a transformative force in the Indian real estate lending domain," said Gaurav Gandhi - Director, Essgee Group.
Home Capital's offering will also have a positive effect on homebuyer's savings and wealth-building capacity. By partnering with various banks, it would also be able to leverage the existing data sets of financial institutions as well as listing platforms. With reduced costs to developers as well as users, a high acceptance for program affiliation has already been created. With a reduction in price by almost five to six percent and almost half the time taken to process the amount, VentureCatalysts has again struck gold by investing trust in an organization that seems to possess every ingredient for a bright future in the home finance domain.
Venture Catalysts is currently operational in seven cities across India, including top metro cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Kolkata, as well as tier-II like cities Lucknow, Raipur, and Surat. VCats is aggressively expanding its physical footprint in high-potential geographies to tap into the country's latent entrepreneurial talent.
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