After his ignominious exit from Housing.com, Rahul Yadav had promised to come back bigger and stronger than before. He’d claimed that his startup would be 10x bigger than housing, and perhaps bigger than “all Indian internet companies put together.” It’s finally emerging what what his grand plans are.
Financial Express has reported that Rahul Yadav’s new venture will be a data analytics and visualization firm and will serve ecommerce companies on a daily basis.The new company will focus on analysing large data to predict consumer behaviour and provide speedy insights at key decision points. While the name of the startup hasn’t been revealed yet, Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Flipkar co-founder Sachin Bansal and Micromax co-founder Rahul Sharma have made personal investments in the company. Sources told OfficeChai that the amount raised is in the range of Rs. 100 crore.
Vijay Shekhar Sharma has apparently confirmed his investment in the company, telling FE that “He (Yadav) is definitely an incredible maverick. He has an understanding of technology and we hope he has learnt his lesson and moved ahead.”
Yadav has been interested in data analytics since his days at Housing. Housing had a large data lab built in Delhi that was doing cutting edge work on slicing and dicing the numbers pertaining to the Indian realty system. Housing had also acquired data firm Realty BI during the fag end of Yadav’s tenure.
Housing’s Chief Design Officer, Suvonil Chatterjee, has quit the company days earlier. Chatterjee is a highly regarded designer who was thought to be responsible for the clean interface of Housing.com and its 120 crore marketing blitz. Given that Yadav’s new startup focuses on visualization, it is likely that Chatterjee would be involved in the project as well.
While the Big Boss rumours were an interesting diversion, Rahul did have something up his sleeve.