Online furniture and design company Homelane on Monday said it has acquired Capricoast.com, an online marketplace for home interior goods for Rs 90 crore. Homelane’s chief executive Srikanth Iyer said in an interview that the start-up will use the acquisition to enhance its technology and expand into new categories.
Post-acquisition, Capricoast’s team of 120 employees will be a part of Homelane, the company said in a statement. Jawad Ayaz, founder of Capricoast will join HomeLane.com’s board.
“The Capricoast team brings with them a powerful technology back-end that will further strengthen our product offering. This acquisition also marks the beginning of HomeLane’s next phase of growth and expansion, given that we have already achieved operational profitability,” Iyer said in a statement.
Homelane provides design modules for kitchen spaces, bedrooms, and other furniture sets like wardrobes, storage units, and study tables to homeowners. It uses a proprietary virtual reality platform named SpaceCraft that helps homeowners make virtual designs of their homes with help from a professional designer.
The company also has an affiliate programme for sourcing designers onto the platform. Homelane pays a 6% commission to affiliate designers for every design project that they take up for customers. Home Lane will manufacture and install the furniture at the customer’s site while the designer will oversee customer relationship as well.
Homelane is present in Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Mumbai and NCR cities. It was founded in 2014 by Srikanth Iyer and Rama Harinath. Iyer told Mint that the company has completed around 1,700 design projects till date at an average cost of Rs6.5 lakh per project.
Most of the company’s customers are new homeownersOnline furniture with very few repeat purchases and it targets new homes between Rs55 lakh and Rs2 crore, Iyer added.
Till date, Homelane has raised about $15 million in venture funding from investors such as Sequoia Capital, Aarin, Growth Story and Baring PE. Its competitor Livspace recently announced that it would invest Rs70 crore in its affiliate initiative which allows freelance designers and architects to sell their home designs on Livspace.
Source: Mint