The deal is a combination of cash and equity. Other details of the agreement have not been disclosed yet
Bakfy team (left) with the Co-founders of CommonFloor
Real estate portal CommonFloor has acquired Bangalore-based startup Bakfy, a mobile app for students in India where they can freely share campus gossips, secrets, rumours, jokes, memes and thoughts with other students.
As part of the deal, the Bakfy team will join CommonFloor as entrepreneurs-in-residence and will work directly with the founders to build social and mobile products. The size of the deal is undisclosed, but is a combination of cash and equity.
Sumit Jain, Co-founder and CEO, CommonFloor said, “Talent acquisition is one of the best ways for us to get teams on board that are collaborative and entrepreneurial, think out of the box and are hungry to develop disruptive products. CommonFloor is quite bullish on mobile, and the Bakfy team brings a proven capability of scaling up a mobile-only social network in India which is quite unique.”
CommonFloor had earlier acquired Mumbai-based Flat.to and competes with SoftBank-backed Housing.com.
On the acquisition, Ashutosh Garg, Co-founder and CEO, Bakfy, said, “Bakfy chose to be acquired by CommonFloor because the opportunity in the real estate space is immense. We spent hours with Sumit and Lalit (Co-founders) talking about social networking and real estate sector and they loved our ideas. Having done a similar app themselves, called Ugal Do, they could relate to what we were trying to do.”
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Founded by Garg, Niranjan Bala and Rajesh Eswarlal, a Bakfy user can sign up with the college name and start posting right away. One can either share something with a particular college or publicly in which case it is visible to all students from other colleges as well. The user can choose to be anonymous while sharing, and also comment, like or report a post. There is no concept of a friend request or following someone like on most other social networks. One person from each college acts like a moderator and keeps tab on the conversations.
The first version of the app was developed within three weeks and launched in a college in Bangalore. After getting user feedback and revamping design for the app, the public beta was launched in March 2014. The startup was mentored and incubated by Nasscom’s 10,000 Startups initiative.
In an earlier interview with e27, Garg stressed on the importance of Southeast Asia as a market for Bakfy. “Once we cross 150-200 colleges in India, we would look to expand in the region. These markets are really critical because they are much similar to India in terms of app usage pattern of youngsters. Unlike the US/UK markets, these markets are not really flooded with social networking apps. So we feel we can definitely bring in something new for students there,” he stated.
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