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For house owners, Square Plums offers the benefit of letting out a fully furnished house, with up to 50 per cent higher rentals, without having to spend on furnishing the house

Square Plums, a branded rental homes platform in India, has received INR 3 crore (US$450,000) from Indian Angel Network (IAN).

The round was led by experienced entrepreneurs and IAN lead investors, including VGN Prakash, Amitabh Shrivastava, Krishna Jha and Ravindra Krishnappa.

The capital will be used to onboard the properties and build a robust technology platform for tenants, apartment owners and prospective tenants. The company also plans to launch a mobile app.

The startup was founded in February 2016 by BITS Pilani alumni Rajesh Kumar Kotta and Hemant Attray.

Square Plums is a branded rental homes chain for singles. It makes it easy for singles to rent fully furnished homes in prime locations. All Square Plums homes are curated, designed and furnished with a lot of attention keeping in mind the unique requirements of singles.

For house owners, Square Plums offers the benefit of letting out a fully furnished house, with up to 50 per cent higher rentals, without having to spend on furnishing the house.

Currently, Square Plums accommodation options are available in Bangalore.

In cities like Bangalore, finding an apartment to rent is a time-consuming process. One needs to engage a broker and visit multiple apartments before finding a suitable one. Online platform list many options, but often when the property is visited, users find that what was listed is not what is actually available.

This is a bigger problem for singles because many home owners reject renting to singles. Even when an apartment is available for singles, it comes with a heavy security deposit. Besides if a few friends get together and pool the costs of the security deposit and furniture, they face problems when one of the friends decides to move out for professional or personal reasons.

There are hardly any homes that come fully furnished and without heavy security deposits.

“While the problems faced by bachelors trying to rent apartments are oft repeated, we also tried to think from the perspective of the home owner. An individual homeowner does not have the wherewithal to do background checks of tenants and chooses the safe option of renting his home only to families,” says Kumar.

“It is quite expensive to furnish an apartment and there is no choice but to pass on this responsibility to tenants. Individuals moving to the city without a family find it a cumbersome cost to put down heavy deposits and purchase furniture for a short term that eventually turns into baggage that needs to be moved around, whenever the home is changed. The usual compromise is to settle into a shoddy PGs/hostels which offers poor accommodation and lifestyle options. So we came up with a solution that i s a win-win for both the home owners and the tenants,” he added.

IAN is a business angels group, with more than 400 investors from 10 countries. IAN’s presence spans seven locations, which include cities in India and the UK. IAN has invested in startups from over 17 diverse industries/sectors.

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