A critical factor in the success of a startup depends on the industry in which the company provides technology services. Established in Chennai, Facilio has expanded its business beyond India and into various countries of the world by operating in the real estate sector. The company’s founder, Prabhu Ramachandran, explained to us how he built a SaaS company in the real estate industry.
“Though my hometown is Chennai, I was born and brought up in a slum. Sirusheri has now merged with Chennai. However, when I was growing up, Chennai was very far from us.
I studied engineering. After graduation I joined Advent Net (old name of Zoho). I worked there for 17 years. There were promotions and responsibilities to the next level according to the skills. In 2016, the idea of starting an own company arose. I was the Director of “webNMS” at Zoho. Then an idea came. Let me illustrate the idea with an example.
You have seen the tower of telecom companies in many places. Computers can detect how these towers are functioning and send people there to fix them. This can save human time to a great extent. This is the basic idea of our start-up.
There is some new disruption happening in every sector. But we observed that there was no major disruption in the real estate sector.
Knowingly or unknowingly 90% of our time is dependent on real estate. Home, office, mall, trade halls, hospital, factories are all under one roof. Surprisingly, no one paid any attention to it.
When it comes to real estate, there are three levels. Construction, sales, maintenance related activities. There have been a lot of technological changes in construction and sales. After that there is still room for change.
We wanted to bring a change in the real estate industry like Uber brought a change in the automotive industry. Uber doesn’t own any cars; It also does not have a driver; Neither retain customers. But the integration of these three parties through technology led to a new business. We do the same. We have no building; We don’t manage maintenance people, we don’t handle anything including electricity. All we do is fix these with technology.
Let’s take a mall in real estate. Malls are crowded during holidays. So more AC and lighting is required. But if it rains during the holidays, many people will not come to the mall. If there was too much AC or light then it was in vain. So it can provide real-time data about how many people are in a particular area, where air conditioning is needed, and where lighting is not needed. This leaves not only manpower but also electricity.
If a company has malls across India, they can be monitored at one place. This is our software.
Four of us formed this company together. All four of us just came from Joho. Not a big problem economically. More importantly; We raised funds based on the idea. We had funding from day one of the company. We pitched our idea to Accel Partners. We started with a million dollar investment. Following that, in 2018, Tiger Global invested $6.5 million. We raised $38 million in investment a few months ago. So we have no financial problem.
Now we are expanding our reach internationally. Dubai is an important market for us. Real estate is everything there. followed by New York. Also, we are in the process of expanding to many international cities.
The real estate sector has been hit the hardest by the Covid-19 pandemic. Our kitchen is difficult during covid. Our service is not needed for the whole year 2020. But we continued to focus on our products. There was hope that the market would recover anyway.
It was imperative to manage real estate without human intervention. So our need in 2020 is not much. After that the demand for us increased rapidly. Currently our clients are major real estate companies in 12 countries internationally. “Our customer base will continue to increase worldwide,” Prabhu concluded enthusiastically.
Facilio is the perfect example of what if you think about it, success is guaranteed!