Students and young professionals, when they move to a different city, prefer staying as paying guests or sharing rooms in a flat for economic viability. Landlords generally have single or multiple flats custom-made for such tenants. It’s quite common in cities like Patna, Kota, Mumbai, and Delhi.
Landlords have traditionally managed tenants using basic tools for communications or payment reminders. Tenants, too, rely on the same, which is both cumbersome and archaic. But what if there was a more organized way to manage all of this?
Crib, a Bengaluru-based startup, is trying to solve exactly this — helping landlords better manage their day-to-day operations and finances through a single platform.
The startup was founded in 2021 by Sunny Garg, Shaifali Jain, and Archit Chauhan. Garg and Jain previously co-founded YourShell, a Delhi-based student housing firm, which was later acquired by Stanza Living.
Crib offers tenant onboarding and offboarding, staff management, complaint management (view, assign, and close), collections (auto-reminders, auto-receipts, dues creation), payments, inventory management, and more. Landlords get three months of free subscription to the app. After the expiry of the free subscription, landlords pay a subscription fee that is around Rs 50 per bed per month.
“Nearly 80% of the landlords have signed up for the paid version after the end of the free subscription,” Garg told Entrackr.
The platform also caters to tenants who can use it for things like sharing KYC details, paying the rent, and complaint management (raise, track, and feedback).
In January, Crib raised $400,000 in a pre-seed funding round led by Pranay Gupta (co-founder, 91Springboard) through his AngelList syndicate 91Ventures. BlackSoil Capital, Faad Network along with other angel investors also participated.
The company is currently in the process of raising approximately $2 million, Garg told Entrackr without disclosing more details.
The startup currently hosts more than 150 landlords who run 500 properties with more than 30,000 beds. At the moment, Bengaluru is Crib’s largest market, which accounts for nearly 95% of the traction. The startup aims to increase this number to 1500 paid landlords managing up to 2,00,000 beds by Sep 2023. It will be spread across all major cities – Delhi-NCR, Dehradun, Kota, Hyderabad, Bengaluru, and Chennai.
Garg also disclosed the company’s roadmap which includes diversifying Crib into a broader SaaS-based asset-light platform wherein users can get services like food, laundry, furniture, and more. The company plans to remain asset-light as opposed to other business models which involve owning or leasing inventory. The model will eventually evolve into a SaaS marketplace wherein it will charge 1% of the total revenue generated by a landlord for SaaS and make around 4-5% of revenue from the marketplace.
Crib competes with platforms like Stanza Living, which raised more than $100 million in April 2021. Stanza, also a soonicorn, is currently present in more than 24 cities and manages 70,000 beds. Other known names in organized accommodation space are EazyPg, Housemonk, and Spacebasic.
