Square Yards is a proptech platform that combines property discovery with mortgages, interiors, rentals, and after-sale management.
The latest Square Yards funding round brings in ₹900 crore, or about $95 million, in a mix of debt and equity led by EAAA Alternatives with Muzinich & Co also participating. Buying a home in India is still a fragmented mess of brokers, loan paperwork, legal checks, and post-possession work. That’s the gap Square Yards has spent years trying to stitch together under one roof. Founded in 2014 by Tanuj Shori and Kanika Gupta Shori, the company is now past the $1 billion mark and pushing toward a public listing.
It’s a big jump from the company’s November 28, 2025 round, when it raised $35 million at a $900 million pre-money valuation. Square Yards also wants to raise another $50 million to $60 million over the next quarter, with market chatter pointing to a possible $1.6 billion valuation for that next raise.
What is Square Yards and how does it work?
At a practical level, Square Yards runs an end-to-end property transaction stack. A buyer can start with need discovery, move into curated shortlisting, book site visits, compare pricing and ROI, close the booking, and line up a home loan through Urban Money. Legal help on documentation comes next. Then buyers can plug into interiors or rental management after possession. That’s a lot closer to a managed transaction service than a plain listings portal.
The tech layer is more serious than the usual “search by BHK and budget” pitch. Its Data Intelligence engine pulls from millions of government sub-registrar records to show price history and comparable sales. It also surfaces demand heatmaps and price-versus-size analytics. PropVR adds immersive 3D walkthroughs and virtual site visits over video. An AI-based e-Valuation tool estimates market value, rental yield, and circle-rate benchmarks.
Then there’s the rest of the stack. Urban Money handles loan matching and mortgage advisory. Interior Company takes care of design and execution. Azuro runs tenant discovery and rent collection. It also handles maintenance and compliance for landlords. So the customer experience doesn’t end at “lead generated” — which, frankly, is where a lot of property sites stop.
That full-journey setup also strips out a ton of manual work. Instead of a buyer separately chasing brokers, loan agents, lawyers, interior vendors, and rental managers, Square Yards tries to keep the handoffs inside one operating system. The product design is much broader than classifieds.
Who founded Square Yards and how did it grow?
The founding story
Square Yards was started in 2014 by husband-wife duo Tanuj Shori and Kanika Gupta Shori. The company’s origin story wasn’t the usual “founders spotted a tiny workflow problem” version. Tanuj has said the founding team came from corporate jobs, had meaningful personal exposure to real estate as an asset class, and wanted to build something larger in a sector with obvious inefficiencies and a wide trust gap.
Why the founders had market fit
Tanuj brought finance muscle into a business that sits right at the intersection of property and capital. Before Square Yards, he spent more than 8 years in global capital markets roles at Standard Chartered Bank, Lehman Brothers, and Nomura across Asia Pacific and the US, and he studied at the Indian Institutes of Management. That matters because a real estate platform with mortgages, data products, and IPO ambitions needs more than consumer-internet instincts.
Kanika Gupta Shori brought a different kind of fit. She studied economics at Delhi University and is a graduate of the Wharton School, and Square Yards credits her with helping scale operations across 10 countries and 40 cities. Her background spans asset management, entrepreneurship, and business strategy. It lines up neatly with the messy execution burden of building a cross-border real estate operation.
Traction before the new round
By FY26, Square Yards had stopped looking like an early-stage story and started looking like a scaled operating business. Revenue rose 48% year over year to ₹2,086 crore from ₹1,410 crore in FY25, while EBITDA jumped about 3.7x to ₹176 crore. The company also disclosed 2,73,643 customers acquired in FY26, ₹13,236 crore of houses transacted during the year, and ₹87,831 crore of loans disbursed through Urban Money.
How the round was put together
The fresh capital raise totals ₹900 crore, roughly $95 million, and combines debt with equity. EAAA Alternatives led the round. Muzinich & Co participated. Orion Capital Partners acted as lead arranger for the transaction. Square Yards will use the money to expand in its current markets — India, the UAE, Australia, and Canada — while strengthening its technology infrastructure as it gets ready for an IPO.
This came just months after the November 2025 pre-IPO round led by Smile Gate, which brought in $35 million at a $900 million valuation. Earlier reporting had pegged the IPO at about ₹2,000 crore, split roughly between a fresh issue and an offer for sale, with the founders still expected to hold more than 50% after listing. Including the new infusion, Square Yards has raised $208.8 million to date from investors including Bennett Coleman & Co. Ltd., Reliance Group Holdings, ADM Capital, and Smilegate VC.
The latest round also pushed the company into the unicorn club at a valuation above $1 billion, making it the 131st Indian startup to get there. It was also the second startup to enter the unicorn club that month, after Sarvam raised $234 million in a $300 million Series B at a $1.5 billion post-money valuation.
How does Square Yards compare with MagicBricks, 99acres, and Housing.com?
This is where the company’s pitch gets sharper. MagicBricks is still huge — more than 12 million monthly visits and over 8 lakh active listings. It also offers a broad set of tools around search, locality data, alerts, calculators, and project reports. Housing.com also looks more like a scaled digital property platform, with buying, renting, virtual viewing, home loans, post-transaction support, and operations across 28 Indian cities.
Square Yards is competing with those players, plus 99acres, but it doesn’t frame the job as media, traffic, or listings alone. Its differentiator is the tighter operating stack: advisory-led transactions and in-house financing rails. It also includes post-possession interiors and rental management. The legacy alternatives are still offline brokers, developer sales desks, and disconnected service vendors. Investors are betting that a more integrated model can capture more revenue from every home transaction — not just the first click.
Why does the Square Yards funding round matter?
This round matters because it changes the conversation from “promising proptech startup” to “pre-IPO, profitable operator.” Plenty of real estate internet businesses can generate traffic. Far fewer can show revenue above ₹2,000 crore, improving margins, and cross-sell economics across mortgages, interiors, and rentals at the same time.
It also gives Square Yards more room to harden the parts of the business that aren’t flashy but matter a lot — balance sheet strength and technology systems. Expansion execution matters too. So does the discipline public-market investors will look for. EAAA Alternatives’ thesis was basically that this is a profitable market leader in a fragmented category with operating leverage still kicking in. That’s not a casual bet.
For customers, the upside is simpler: a company with more capital can invest in better transaction support and more market coverage. Tighter product integration is part of that. For Square Yards, the real prize is credibility. Unicorn status is nice for headlines. IPO readiness is what actually resets valuation expectations.
How big is the Indian proptech market?
India’s proptech market reached $1.31 billion in 2025 and is projected to grow to $3.82 billion by 2034, which implies a 12.26% CAGR. Residential use cases account for 58.4% of the market, and cloud deployment already makes up 64.3%. Digital real estate in India isn’t niche anymore. It’s becoming normal infrastructure.
The timing makes sense. The same market study ties growth to rising smartphone penetration and Smart Cities investments. It also points to AI-led property platforms and digital transaction tools. India’s real estate sector is a $300 billion-plus base that’s still mid-transition, not fully digitized. That’s why platforms are moving beyond listings into valuation, financing, compliance, and ownership services — exactly the direction Square Yards has been pushing.
What happens next after Square Yards funding?
The next milestone isn’t another press release. It’s execution.
Square Yards now has to prove that its integrated model can stay profitable while expanding across India and overseas markets. It also has to show that the extra capital deepens its tech moat instead of just funding growth for growth’s sake. If the follow-on raise lands near the rumored $1.6 billion mark and the IPO plan holds, Square Yards funding will look less like a one-off unicorn pop and more like the last private step before the public markets start judging the company for real.
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FAQ
- What happened in the latest Square Yards funding round?
Square Yards raised ₹900 crore, or about $95 million, in a mix of debt and equity and crossed the $1 billion valuation mark. EAAA Alternatives led the round, Muzinich & Co joined in, and the company is also targeting another $50 million to $60 million over the next quarter as it moves closer to an IPO. - How does Square Yards actually work for a homebuyer?
It works like a managed property transaction platform rather than a simple listings site. A customer can move from discovery and shortlisting to site visits, loan support, legal coordination, interiors, and even rental management. Tools like Data Intelligence, PropVR, and e-Valuation sit underneath that journey. - Who founded Square Yards?
Square Yards was founded in 2014 by Tanuj Shori and Kanika Gupta Shori. Tanuj came from global capital markets roles at Standard Chartered, Lehman Brothers, and Nomura, while Kanika brought experience across asset management, entrepreneurship, and strategy, backed by Delhi University and Wharton credentials. - Is Square Yards a proptech company or a real estate marketplace?
It’s both, but the more accurate label is integrated proptech. Square Yards still operates a real estate marketplace, yet its business now stretches into mortgages through Urban Money and interiors through Interior Company. It also includes rental management through Azuro, along with AI- and VR-led transaction tools that go beyond basic property search.
