Till date, the online realty startup has raised over US$100 million in capital from SoftBank, Nexus, Falcon Edge, Qualcomm, Yuri Milner etc.
Vivek Jain
SoftBank-backed online real estate company Housing.com has appointed Vivek Jain as Chief Product and Technology Officer.
Jain will focus on strengthening the product and engineering aspects of the business to help steer Housing towards its goal of becoming a full-service transaction player.
Also Read: There will be a Housing in me forever: Housing.com Co-founder Advitiya Sharma steps down
Jain is an industry veteran with over 14 years’ experience in the technology and digital domains in India and the US.
He started his career as an early member of Texas-based startup Ashley Laurent. Within three months, he was promoted as Deputy Director/India Country Head and the company was later acquired by Cisco. After this, he joined Motorola Mobility, a division of Google where he managed relationships with carriers in several developed and emerging markets.
In the past, he has also worked at Amazon, where he was the Bandwidth Product/Business Head for Amazon Web Services.
Jain returned to India in 2014 to join Reliance Jio (subsidiary of Reliance Industries) as Vice President. He later moved to join CA Media Digital (owned by The Chernin Group and private equity firm KKR) as its CEO.
Founded in 2012 by a team of IIT dropouts, Housing.com has been one of the most talked-about tech startups in India. The firm was one of the darlings of investors and domestic media until its then CEO Rahul Yadav shot an e-mail to Shilendra Singh, a noted VC investor and Managing Director of Sequoia Capital, over employee poaching.
Also Read: Deal with it, Rahul. Quitting isn’t an option. Emulate Steve Jobs and also learn media relations
The company’s fall from grace started from there. Soon after this e-mail episode, Yadav termed Housing’s Board members intellectually incapable that resulted in his unceremonious exit.
Last year, the company fired over 600 people as part of restructuring. Most of its Co-founders have have already quit the firm.
Housing claims to have listed 1.7 million verified homes to date. It has also made a number of strategic acquisitions, including Indian Real Estate Forum, Realty Business Intelligence and HomeBuy360.
Housing.com has raised over US$100 million in capital from SoftBank, Nexus Ventures, Falcon Edge, Helion Ventures, Nirvana Ventures, Qualcomm, DST Founder Yuri Milner, Viacom 18 Co-founder Haresh Chawla, and Snapdeal Co-founders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal.
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