Startup Deep Dive : Reloy — the proptech platform India’s biggest home loan lender bet on

Reloy has helped Indian real estate developers close more than ₹1,450 crore worth of homes through pure referrals in a single year (FY24, as reported by Business Standard, May 2024) — yet the company is not licensed to sell a single flat itself. Under the terms of its own RERA registration, Reloy cannot broker property; it can only run the loyalty and referral technology that gets existing homeowners, brokers and employees to do the selling for the builder.

That contradiction is the whole business. Reloy’s own revenue was a fraction of the sales it helped generate — ₹28.5 crore (about $3.0 million at $1 ≈ ₹96.0, 18 September 2026, Trading Economics) in FY25, up 60% from the year before (as per Business Standard, June 2025) — because it never touches the transaction. It sells the software, the gamified engagement, and the broker-management layer that developers plug into their sales process. Fourteen years after incorporation, an HDFC Capital-backed platform that started life as a generic loyalty-and-gifting company is now trying to become the default customer-and-channel-partner operating system for Indian real estate.

Quick facts

What they do

Reloy sells software to real estate developers, not homes to buyers. Its platform sits on top of a builder’s existing sales operation and turns three groups — homeowners who already bought a flat, channel-partner brokers who sell it, and the builder’s own sales staff — into a managed referral engine. A developer pays Reloy a technology fee (and, on top of it, a share tied to sales performance) to run loyalty programmes, gamified contests, automated broker payouts and post-possession engagement, all aimed at generating a second wave of sales through people who already trust the project. The company describes itself as a “digital amenities” layer for the home-owning journey rather than a marketing agency or a brokerage, a distinction that matters because Indian real estate regulation treats the two very differently.

The origin

Akhil Saraf grew up in Kolkata, was studying to become a chartered accountant, and was expected to join his family’s tax-consulting business. He left that path and, along with Abhay Ambo and Devesh Jhunjhunwala, incorporated Loyalie IT-Solutions Private Limited on 28 May 2015 in Mumbai (as per TheCompanyCheck, corporate records). Several later press reports, including Business Insider India and Zee Business, instead describe Reloy as “founded… in 2018” — a discrepancy this piece cannot fully resolve, but one the company’s own account explains: Reloy’s about-us page dates its focused, referral-driven business to 2017, several years after the entity itself was registered for a broader mix of loyalty, rewards and marketing-scheme work.

The founding insight was narrow and specific to India’s real estate market after the 2016 Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act, or RERA: developers had no structured way to convert a happy homeowner into a source of new sales, because commission-based selling to a builder’s own database sat in a legal grey zone. Loyalie’s founders built a version of the business designed to secure RERA approval for referral-only sales — engagement and reward technology that could legally generate leads and closings without the company itself acting as a broker. That regulatory-first design choice is what let the business survive long enough to find a market.

The struggle years

The first seven years were unglamorous. Loyalie was bootstrapped for six of them, according to the company’s own about-us page, with no institutional capital and a business that had started life doing “marketing schemes,” “loyalty/reward bonuses” and even real estate brokerage services for whichever client would pay, per its registered corporate objects. That lack of focus is itself a documented struggle: a company trying to be a loyalty vendor, a rewards vendor and a broker at once, inside a newly regulated sector that was actively punishing exactly that kind of ambiguity.

Two later moments count as real pivots, not just messaging changes. In 2017, the company narrowed itself to a single, RERA-compliant referral-sales model — the founders have said this meant walking away from broader loyalty and gifting work that had been paying the bills. Then, when the COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020 shut down site visits and sales offices nationwide, the company had to rebuild its core acquisition motion around content marketing to keep referrals flowing with no physical touchpoints — a forced pivot in the middle of a sector-wide freeze on the in-person selling that real estate had always depended on. Neither event is disclosed with a rupee figure attached, but both are dated, company-acknowledged departures from the business as it existed before them.

The turning point

The clearest before-and-after split in Reloy’s history is February 2022. Before it: a six-year-old, self-funded company called Loyalie, with FY23 revenue of roughly ₹12.7 crore (as per Business Standard, May 2024) and no institutional shareholder. In that single month, the company did two things at once — it rebranded from Loyalie to Reloy, publicly committing to “Real Estate LOYalty” as its only business and disavowing primary broking, and it closed a ₹5 crore pre-Series A round led by Inflection Point Ventures with the Fawkes Fund, the family office behind Greenpanel and Greenlam, and more than 50 angel investors (as per Entrackr, January 2022).

After it: within a month, HDFC Capital Advisors — the investment arm of India’s largest housing-finance lender — bought a 7.2% stake in the company for ₹1.1 crore (as per Business Standard, March 2022), the first mortgage-industry institutional stamp on the business. Revenue then compounded from that ₹12.7 crore FY23 base to ₹17.8-21 crore in FY24 (sources disagree on the exact figure; see “The numbers” below) and on to ₹28.5 crore in FY25. HDFC Capital came back in 2023 to buy more shares at ₹89.81 apiece, pushing its stake toward 9.6-10%. The rebrand-plus-funding combination is the moment the company stopped being a diversified loyalty vendor and became a single-purpose proptech platform with a bank-backed investor validating that focus.

The money behind it

Reloy has raised roughly ₹13 crore in total disclosed external funding across three rounds, a small amount by Indian startup standards, financed mostly by strategic and angel money rather than marquee venture funds:

• Pre-Series A, January 2022 — ₹5 crore, led by Inflection Point Ventures, with the Fawkes Fund, the family office of Greenpanel and Greenlam, and a group of 50-plus angel investors (Entrackr, January 2022)
• Institutional stake purchase, March 2022 — ₹1.1 crore for a 7.2% stake bought directly by HDFC Capital Advisors under its H@ART real-estate-technology initiative (Business Standard, March 2022)
• Pre-Series A2, 2023 — ₹7.2 crore, with all existing investors participating alongside new backers BlueLotus VC and Dream Green Capital (Business Standard/Zee Business, 2023)
• Follow-on stake purchase, 2023 — HDFC Capital bought further shares at ₹89.81 apiece, worth roughly ₹1.49 crore, lifting its holding toward 9.6-10% (Business Insider India/Zee Business, 2023)

What each backer changed: Inflection Point Ventures and its 50-plus-angel syndicate supplied the company’s first institutional capital and coincided with the Loyalie-to-Reloy rebrand. HDFC Capital’s entry mattered less for the cheque size and more for the signal — a subsidiary of India’s largest mortgage lender taking a direct equity position gave Reloy credibility with the developer community it needed to sell into, and HDFC Capital has since increased its stake twice. No priced valuation for any of these rounds has been made public in the sources reviewed for this piece, so this article does not state one.

How it makes money

Reloy runs two named product lines, both sold to developers rather than to homebuyers directly:

• ConnectRE — a homeowner loyalty and referral platform: engagement, gamified contests, benefits and event access for people who have already bought a home, designed to convert them into referral sources for the same developer
• WinnRE — a channel-partner and broker-management platform: broker empanelment, real-time lead tracking, and automated commission and invoicing workflows for the external agents who sell a developer’s inventory

Money in: developers pay platform and technology fees to run these programmes across a project or their whole portfolio, and — where disclosed publicly — the model is described as linked to referral-driven sales performance rather than a flat licence fee alone. Money out: technology and product development, the sales and account-management team needed to work with each developer’s internal sales desk, and the cost of the loyalty benefits and rewards fulfilled on the platform. Reloy has not published a take rate, a per-project fee schedule or a gross margin figure, so none of those numbers appear here.

The part people tend to get wrong: Reloy is not paid on the ₹1,450 crore-plus of referral sales it says it helps generate each year (as per Business Standard, May 2024, and the company’s own site) — that figure is the value of homes sold through the platform’s referrals, not Reloy’s revenue. Its own revenue, ₹28.5 crore in FY25, is roughly 2% of that referral-sales figure, which is the clearest illustration of how thin the software layer sits on top of a much larger transaction it never owns.

The numbers

Reported annual revenue, in ₹ crore:

Two of Business Standard’s own reports disagree on FY24 revenue — ₹21 crore in the May 2024 article against an implied ₹17.8 crore in the June 2025 article on FY25 — a gap of roughly ₹3 crore that neither piece explains, and that may reflect a later restatement of standalone versus consolidated numbers. This piece names both rather than picking one silently. Profit or loss has not been disclosed in any of the sources reviewed; press coverage of Reloy consistently reports revenue and referral-sales-facilitated figures but not net income, so no profit/loss number is stated here for any year.

Referral sales facilitated for developers — the gross value of homes sold through the platform, not Reloy’s own revenue — have grown alongside it:

• FY24: referral sales facilitated of ₹1,450 crore (Business Standard, May 2024)
• FY24 (cited elsewhere as a base for FY25 targets): ₹2,000 crore (propnewstime, September 2025, company-stated)
• FY26 target: ₹3,500 crore, as stated by founder Akhil Saraf (Devdiscourse, September 2025)

Where the money comes from

Reloy does not publish a geography or revenue-segment split in the way a listed company would, but the available reporting points to a concentrated structure:

• Product split: two platforms, ConnectRE (homeowner referrals) and WinnRE (channel-partner/broker management), sold as a combined or standalone suite to each developer client (company website, reloy.co)
• Customer base: described by the company and by Business Standard (June 2025) as “almost all leading real estate developers across major states” — no individual developer names are disclosed in the sources reviewed, so none are used in this piece
• Growth mix: management has said the “core referral sales business” grew 50% in FY25, slower than the 60% headline revenue growth, implying newer lines (broker/channel management, or add-on services) grew faster than the original homeowner-referral product (Business Standard, June 2025)

The surprise is less a geography split than a scale mismatch: a roughly 54-person, ₹28.5-crore-revenue company (headcount as per Revelio Labs LinkedIn data, August 2025) is embedded deeply enough in developer sales operations to be associated with thousands of crores of home sales a year, and the growth is now coming as much from the broker-and-partner side of the platform as from the original homeowner-loyalty product it was built around.

The risks

• Regulatory dependency — Reloy’s entire legal right to operate rests on staying inside RERA’s definition of “referral,” not “broking.” Any tightening of that regulatory line, in any state, could force a redesign of the core product rather than a minor compliance tweak.
• Customer concentration in one cyclical sector — every rupee of revenue comes from real estate developers, a sector whose sales volumes move sharply with interest rates and housing-market cycles; a residential slowdown hits Reloy’s developer customers’ sales budgets before it hits their balance sheets.
• Thin, undisclosed margins on a small base — with revenue of ₹28.5 crore in FY25 and no disclosed profit or loss figure, and total external funding of only around ₹13 crore, Reloy has limited capital cushion if a large developer client churns or delays payment inside a working-capital-intensive homebuilding industry.

The takeaway

Reloy’s story is a reminder that a regulatory constraint, treated as a design brief rather than an obstacle, can become the whole business. The company could not legally sell property, so it built the only thing it was allowed to build around a sale — the loyalty, referral and broker-management layer sitting just outside the transaction — and turned that narrow legal lane into a ₹28.5 crore-revenue platform embedded in thousands of crores of home sales. The lesson travels beyond real estate: when a rule blocks the obvious business model, the more durable company is often the one built to operate legally and precisely at the edge of that rule, rather than the one that waits for the rule to change.

Frequently asked questions

What does Reloy actually sell?

Reloy sells software to real estate developers — loyalty, referral and broker-management technology (its ConnectRE and WinnRE platforms) — not homes to buyers. It is not licensed to broker property sales itself.

How much revenue does Reloy make?

Reloy reported revenue of ₹28.5 crore in FY25 (year to March 2025), up 60% from the prior year, as per Business Standard (June 2025). Reported figures for FY24 vary between sources, ranging from ₹17.8 crore to ₹21 crore.

Note: FY23 revenue was ₹12.7 crore, as per Business Standard (May 2024).

Who are Reloy’s investors?

Disclosed backers include HDFC Capital Advisors (roughly 9.6-10% stake), Inflection Point Ventures, the Fawkes Fund, the family office behind Greenpanel and Greenlam, BlueLotus VC and Dream Green Capital. Total disclosed funding is around ₹13 crore.

Is Reloy profitable?

No profit or loss figure for Reloy has been disclosed in the public filings and press coverage reviewed for this piece, so its profitability cannot be confirmed either way.

Who founded Reloy and when?

Reloy’s legal entity, Loyalie IT-Solutions Private Limited, was incorporated on 28 May 2015 by Akhil Saraf, Abhay Ambo and Devesh Jhunjhunwala. The company itself dates its focused, RERA-approved referral-sales business to 2017, and some press reports describe it as “founded in 2018”; it was rebranded from Loyalie to Reloy on 15 February 2022.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• Business Standard, “Reloy’s revenue up 65% to Rs 21 cr in FY24, referral sales hit Rs 1,450 cr” — May 2024
• Business Standard, “Reloy FY25 revenue rises 60% to ₹28.5 crore on strong referral sales growth” — June 2025
• Business Standard, “HDFC Capital to buy 7.2% stake in realty start-up Loyalie IT Solutions” — March 2022
• Business Standard / Zee Business, coverage of Reloy’s ₹7.2 crore pre-Series A2 round with BlueLotus VC and Dream Green Capital — 2023
• Business Insider India / Zee Business, “HDFC Capital to hike stake in proptech startup Reloy… to up to 9.6%” — 2023
• Entrackr, “Reloy raises Rs 5 Cr in pre-Series A round” — January 2022
• The Week (PTI wire), “Proptech firm Reloy FY25 revenue rises 60 pc to Rs 28.5 cr by generating referral sales for builders” — June 2025
• Devdiscourse, “Reloy’s Referral Revolution: Propelling Real Estate Sales” — September 2025
• propnewstime, “Reloy targets INR 50 crore revenue in FY25 with 75% growth” — September 2025
• Reloy company website (reloy.co) — About Us, “We have some big news” rebrand announcement, and product pages for ConnectRE and WinnRE
• TheCompanyCheck, corporate record for Loyalie IT-Solutions Private Limited (incorporation date and founders)
• Revelio Labs, LinkedIn-derived headcount data for Reloy — August 2025

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