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Startup Deep Dive : PropTiger — sold for a tenth of what it raised, then almost reunited with its old rival

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The Invincible India Startup Deep Dive featured graphic for PropTiger.

In September 2025, PropTiger changed hands for ₹86.45 crore ($9 million) in an all-stock deal — a fraction of the roughly $85 million its earlier backers had put in to build it. The company that once called itself part of “India’s largest online real estate services” group had just been sold off by that same group, REA India, as a business it no longer wanted to own.

This is the story of how a 2011 startup built to fix a broken home-buying experience ended up merged with its biggest rival, absorbed into a News Corp-backed conglomerate, and then quietly carved out of it fourteen years later — with the numbers, at each stage, telling a less triumphant story than the branding did.

Quick facts

Company PropTiger.com (legal entity: PropTiger Marketing Services Pvt Ltd)
Founded 2011, Gurugram
Founder(s) Dhruv Agarwala, Kartik Varma, Prashan Agarwal
Businesses Assisted online brokerage for new/primary residential property; home-loan referrals; PropIndex housing-market research
Latest FY revenue ₹85.35 crore, FY25 (year to March 2025), down 15.0% year-on-year
Latest FY profit/loss Not separately disclosed in public filings for the standalone entity
Listed Private; parent Aurum PropTech Ltd is listed on the BSE and NSE
Market value / last valuation Acquired for ₹86.45 crore ($9 million) by Aurum PropTech, September 2025, all-stock swap
Key shareholders / CEO Aurum PropTech Ltd (100%, since 26 September 2025); CEO Prakash Tejwani

What they do

PropTiger runs an assisted online brokerage for new and under-construction (“primary”) residential property in India — a narrower, more transaction-heavy business than the classifieds portals it is often lumped in with. A buyer searches listings on PropTiger.com, gets matched with a relationship manager, is walked through site visits and price negotiation with the developer, and is offered home-loan and legal-documentation support to close the deal. On the other side, developers pay PropTiger to bring them buyers and, separately, buy its PropIndex market data and pricing reports, which are also sold to banks and private-equity investors tracking the housing cycle. Unlike resale- and rental-heavy portals such as 99acres or MagicBricks, PropTiger has stayed focused on the first sale of a unit, off a developer’s inventory.

The origin

Dhruv Agarwala had already built and exited an iron-ore mining venture and an education-training business, and had run GE’s infrastructure business and institutional sales in India, before he and Harvard Business School classmate Kartik Varma — with whom he had already co-run a financial-advisory firm, iTrust Financial Advisors, since 2006 — teamed up with ISB and IIT alumnus Prashan Agarwal to start PropTiger in 2011 (Inc42; Ashoka University). The insight was not novel technology; it was structural. India’s residential real estate market was fragmented across thousands of local brokers, riddled with misinformation, and — crucially — almost entirely unmediated for buyers of new construction, where the money at stake and the paperwork involved were both largest. Existing portals listed properties; nobody stood between the buyer and the developer to manage the actual transaction. PropTiger built itself to be that intermediary, betting that trust and hand-holding, not just search, was the product India’s home buyers were missing (Inc42).

The struggle years

The company’s toughest chapters were not all its own making, but it inherited and then lived through them. On 1 July 2015, the board of Housing.com — PropTiger’s fiercest rival, and the company it would later absorb — fired its 26-year-old celebrity CEO Rahul Yadav after months of public clashes with its own investors, only eighteen months after he had given away his roughly ₹150-200 crore stake to Housing.com’s 2,251 employees as a parting gesture during an earlier, aborted resignation (Moneylife; YourStory). The firing triggered a talent exodus at Housing.com that its own former staff predicted would kill the brand outright (TechCrunch).

PropTiger’s own reckoning came a month after it took on that damaged rival. On 10 February 2017, weeks after the Housing.com merger closed, CEO Dhruv Agarwala confirmed the combined company had cut around 200 jobs from “overlapping support functions” of the two organisations (Inc42) — an unsoftened admission that integrating a wounded competitor costs headcount before it produces synergy. And in the fiscal year to March 2025, standalone PropTiger revenue fell 15.0% year-on-year to ₹85.35 crore even as rival portals kept growing, the financial backdrop against which parent REA India ultimately chose to sell the business rather than keep funding its turnaround (Tofler/company filings via hdfcsky.com).

The turning point

The single event that reshaped PropTiger’s history was its 10 January 2017 merger with Housing.com. The numbers on each side of that deal tell you why it happened. In December 2014, SoftBank had led a $90 million round into Housing.com that valued the company at somewhere between $220 million and $250 million (TechCrunch, 2014). Two years of turmoil later — the Rahul Yadav episode, a talent exodus, and a shrinking business — SoftBank was willing to fund Housing.com again only through a $5 million bridge round in November 2016, priced to value the company at just $75 million: a fall of roughly two-thirds from its peak (TechCrunch, 2017; Forbes India). PropTiger, by contrast, arrived at the table having raised a cumulative $85–99 million of its own (accounts differ; Crunchbase data via TechCrunch puts it at $85 million, Tracxn’s tally at $99 million) and, crucially, News Corp’s backing.

The resulting all-stock merger created a combined entity valued at around $280 million, with Australia’s REA Group — majority-owned by News Corp — injecting $50 million of fresh capital and a SoftBank affiliate adding $5 million more (Forbes India; MediaNama). Dhruv Agarwala, PropTiger’s co-founder, became CEO of the merged company; Housing.com’s Jason Kothari departed. The three brands — PropTiger, Housing.com and Makaan.com — were placed under a Singapore holding company, Elara Technologies Pte Ltd, that PropTiger had actually used as its holding vehicle since as early as 2014 (FinSMEs). On paper, India now had a single dominant online real-estate group. In practice, it had bought a rival at a distressed price and then had to spend the next several years, and 200 jobs, stitching the two together.

The money behind it

Each backer changed the company in a distinct way. News Corp’s 2014 capital and boardroom presence were what made the 2017 Housing.com merger possible in the first place. SoftBank’s repeated, shrinking cheques into Housing.com are what forced that merger to happen on PropTiger’s terms rather than the other way round. And Aurum PropTech’s Ashish Deora — who has called the PropTiger deal his company’s “ninth acquisition over the last four years” — is now the one betting that folding PropTiger’s brokerage machinery into a wider distribution business, alongside Aurum’s Sell.do CRM and Aurum Analytica lead-generation units, can do what a decade under News Corp/REA could not (Elite Agent).

How it makes money

PropTiger is a services brokerage dressed in a tech-platform’s clothes, and the distinction matters for how its economics actually work.

The part people usually get wrong is treating PropTiger like a listings marketplace with software margins. It is closer to a feet-on-the-ground sales agency: relationship managers, call-centre teams and site-visit staff do the actual work of converting a lead into a signed booking, and that headcount is the biggest cost line, not servers. The margin, such as it is, sits in high-ticket transactions where a single unit sale can be worth a substantial commission cheque — but that also means revenue rides the same boom-bust cycle as the property market itself, rather than compounding steadily the way a subscription or listings-classifieds business can. It is precisely this profile — commission-dependent, cyclical, labour-intensive — that led Aurum PropTech to slot PropTiger into its “Distribution” business segment rather than treat it as a standalone technology asset (Online Marketplaces, Aurum FY2026 results coverage).

The numbers

Figures below are for PropTiger Marketing Services Pvt Ltd, the main operating entity, drawn from Registrar of Companies filings as reported by corporate-data platforms. Unit: ₹ crore. Standalone net profit or loss for the entity is not disclosed in the publicly accessible portions of these filings and has been left out rather than estimated.

Fiscal year Revenue (₹ crore) YoY change Profit/loss
FY22 (year to Mar 2022) 63.4 — Not disclosed
FY23 (year to Mar 2023) 82.60 up ~30% Not disclosed
FY24 (year to Mar 2024) 100.93 up ~22% Not disclosed
FY25 (year to Mar 2025) 85.35 down 15.0% Not disclosed

Sources: Entrackr’s FY22 proptech revenue tracker for the FY22 figure; hdfcsky.com’s reporting of RoC-filed turnover (also corroborated by thecompanycheck.com’s FY25 summary) for FY23–FY25.

Where the money comes from

PropTiger’s revenue is built almost entirely on the primary housing markets of eight Indian metro regions that its own PropIndex report tracks: Delhi-NCR, the Mumbai Metropolitan Region, Pune, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai, Kolkata and Ahmedabad (Business Today; The Hans India). Under Aurum PropTech, PropTiger’s Distribution business reported more than 170 active developer clients across roughly 12 active sales mandates in its fourth quarter of FY26, alongside sister units Sell.do and Aurum Analytica (Online Marketplaces).

The surprise, for a company often described as a national platform, is how geographically concentrated and developer-dependent this actually is: there is no meaningful rental or resale revenue line, and no significant revenue from smaller cities — growth depends on how many new project launches the eight core metros produce in a given year, not on PropTiger expanding its own footprint.

The risks

The takeaway

PropTiger’s fifteen years show what happens when a brand consolidation solves the story before it solves the economics. Merging with a wounded Housing.com in 2017 did create the headline of “India’s largest online real estate services company,” and it did stop two well-funded rivals from bleeding each other in the same eight cities. It did not, on its own, fix the thing that mattered most: a commission-dependent, labour-heavy brokerage model whose revenue can fall 15% in a year even when the market it sits on is not collapsing. Ownership can be restructured far faster than a take-rate can be improved, and PropTiger’s real lesson is for anyone running a services marketplace: getting bigger by merging with your rival buys you market position, not margin — and if the underlying unit economics are not addressed in the years that follow, the company eventually becomes the asset another, hungrier consolidator buys cheaply, rather than the one that keeps buying.

Frequently asked questions

Who owns PropTiger now?

Aurum PropTech Ltd has owned 100% of PropTiger since 26 September 2025, after an all-stock acquisition from REA India valued at ₹86.45 crore.

Is PropTiger the same company as Housing.com?

No, though the two are closely linked. PropTiger and Housing.com merged in January 2017 and were run together under REA India from 2017 until PropTiger was sold to Aurum PropTech in September 2025. REA Group separately agreed in July 2026 to sell Housing.com itself to Aurum PropTech, a deal expected to complete by 30 September 2026, which would reunite the two brands under one owner again.

How much funding did PropTiger raise before being acquired?

Estimates vary by source: TechCrunch’s reporting (via Crunchbase data) puts PropTiger’s standalone lifetime funding at around $85 million, while Tracxn’s tally puts it at $99 million across five rounds. Its named backers included News Corp, SAIF Partners, Accel Partners and Horizon Ventures.

What is PropTiger’s revenue?

PropTiger Marketing Services Pvt Ltd reported ₹85.35 crore in revenue for FY25 (year to March 2025), down 15.0% from ₹100.93 crore in FY24, per Registrar of Companies filings reported by corporate-data platforms.

Is PropTiger profitable?

This is not publicly disclosed. Standalone net profit or loss figures for PropTiger Marketing Services Pvt Ltd are not available in the accessible portions of its RoC filings; only its revenue line has been consistently reported.

Sources

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

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