Late last month, a new tech alliance was founded with an aim to accelerate the digital transformation of India’s real estate sector. Called as "Built World Technology Alliance" (BWTC), the alliance is being supported by Indian real estate industry leaders Yash Gupta, Anuj Puri and the RMZ Family Office. In a latest development to this, Anuj Puri and Yash Gupta along with CapitalM, the family office of realty developer RMZ Corp, plan to launch a $100 million early-stage fund to invest in companies in the expanding property technology (proptech) segment.

Blue Sky Ventures (BSV), a new venture capital fund has been co-founded by Yash Gupta, Anuj Puri and CapitalM to invest, mentor and create growth opportunities in the proptech space businesses. The alliance will also be lending support to the BWTC alliance and its annual event.

Bluesky plans to raise capital through the alternative investment fund route and both Puri and Gupta will also invest in the proposed fund in their personal capacity.

BSV will invest in early-stage start-ups and will contribute in a direct and significant way to the success of its portfolio companies by leveraging the real estate expertise, operating experience, domain knowledge and relationships of its partners, said a report by Livemint.

The VC fund, which aims to raise the first tranche of capital by the end of this year, aims to encourage innovation in the property sector across the life cycle of a project from conceptualization to occupation and day-to-day management.

India is one of the most dynamic markets in proptech, with the maximum proptech deals since 2013, according to property advisory JLL India. It said the proptech business is dominated by online brokerage platforms aimed at the residential space, with a few players such as JLL India who have built online platforms for commercial brokerage.

Anuj Puri is a former chairman and country head of JLL India, who left the firm in early 2017 to start his own venture, Anarock Property Consultants.

According to Puri, realty sector in India has not been very open to new technologies. “The idea is to back companies that will bring in technology in real estate to increase efficiency and productivity,” he said in a statement.

After setting up Anarock last year, Puri appointed Rahul Yadav, former co-founder and CEO of Housing.com, as chief product and technology officer.

“While there have been a lot of investments in the financial and educational technology, funding in proptech has been fairly untouched but has a lot of opportunities across a project lifecycle,” said Abhishek Goenka, CEO of RMZ family office. Before joining RMZ this year, Goenka was a senior partner at PriceWaterCooper (PwC).

CapitalM is an investor in disruptive real estate technologies and provides Series A to Series C funding to entrepreneurs who have an established product and user base but need growth capital to scale their business. Its recent investments are - CoWrks, a co-working space firm; Smarten Spaces, which is an AI and IoT-enabled space digitisation platform for real estate firms; and, SpazeBud App, a community engagement app that allows community building, forming groups. chatting, virtual stores, medical appointments, ordering food, etc.

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