Noida-based student housing startup Placio has raised $2 million in pre-series-A funding from Prestellar Ventures, a Singapore-based private equity, reported Economic Times.

The fund raised will be use by the startup to provide superior student living experience in India and South-East Asia, and also to increase its existing capacity by 20 times by end of 2018 by leveraging on the network and experience of the Prestellar Ventures in redefining student hostel hospitality sector.

Founded in March 2016 by Rohit Pateria and Ankush Arora, Placio is an Amity Innovation Incubator incubated startup that offers student housing and a complete broker-free platform that inspires community living. It's digital platform carefully curates modern living spaces, fully-furnished rooms, private rooms and personal apartments in some of the best localities in and around University Campuses, which are available within all budget ranges.

"Placio has been able to address the needs of the rapidly expanding college student population of India- by providing safe, clean, amenity-filled housing with a strong community and technology backbone. The company has been able to grow its footprint so far with limited resources and we hope to provide the company with capital and our in-house platform for its next phase of exponential growth." said Rabindra Shrestha, Managing Partner of Prestellar Ventures.

In India, Placio competes with other such startup like Delhi-based Stanza Living and StudentAcco and also Zolo, which caters to PG segment. Stanza Living is backed by investors like Matrix and Accel Partners while Zolo had raised $5 million from Nexus Venture Partners, in January 2017. Studentacco, which is also based out of Noida is bootstrapped.

To recall, Flatchat founder Gaurav Munjal had also founded similar student accommodation platform called Flat.to which later got acquired by Commonfloor, in 2014.

The market for student accommodation seems to be growing in India, where it is believed to be worth $3 million. A survey conducted in 2016 suggested that there were close to 50 lakh students enrolling in colleges and universities across 20 cities in the country.

Of these, close to 54 percent were from other cities, and only 4.8 lakh hostel seats were available for the base of 27.5 lakh students. This meant that the remaining students had to seek accommodation at PGs or flats.
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