Bangalore, September 10, 2015: Livspace has announced the acquisition of YoFloor, a mobile platform that offers a virtual trial room for home design decisions. Founded by Ankur Mishra and Archit Rathi and incubated at Mango Technologies, the YoFloor app helps homeowners envision how different home designs, furniture pieces, and furnishings would look like, in one’s ‘own’ home. Livspace is India’s first and only end-to-end home design and décor service provider and curated marketplace for homeowners and designers. This acquisition by the company helps round up the previous acquisitions of design community marketplaces DezignUp and Dwll.in. With YoFloor, Livspace can provide high quality productivity and 3D visualization tools to in-house designers and those that will come from the community.
Founded by Anuj Srivastava, Shagufta Anurag and Ramakant Sharma, Livspace is home to India’s biggest community of home design enthusiasts (over 575 thousand), with engagement of more than 200% more than Houzz.com and comparables in India. Livspace is funded by Helion, Bessemer Venture Partners and Jungle Ventures. As part of the acquisition, the founders and the core team of YoFloor will join the Livspace family.
As a homeowner, when you are getting ready to design your home, you often begin with clipping inspiration pictures from all over the web and magazines. Once you share these inspirations with your designer, traditionally, it results in plenty of back and forth — spread over meetings and emails — while the designer tries to perfect what you want for your home. With the acquisition of YoFloor, Livspace is set to meet its vision of creating a path breaking WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) productivity tool that can empower designers to give the homeowner an immersive design experience in real time — eliminating the need for a lengthy exchange of design iterations and feedback.
It is will be the first platform in India which can be used by both homeowners and designers to facilitate the visualization of a look or home design in one’s own home, before you make any purchase. The platform will allow designers to upload your home and layout, to present looks that you’ve selected and personalize them to your taste right in front of you. Hence, deciding upon a final design or look for your home will take the least amount of your time but with an augmented visualization, it will still remain a highly involved experience like it should.
The tool will be available for both Livspace in-house designers and their designer community, to bring the benefit of Livspace designs to cities all across India as the company expands to newer markets.
Speaking about the acquisition, Anuj Srivastava, CEO and Co-founder of Livspace said, “We are thrilled to welcome Archit and Ankur on board at Livspace. With our previous acquisitions we have built a thriving design community of both designers and homeowners. Now, we will leverage the YoFloor acquisition and focus on building creative tools for our designer community and bring even more scale and choice to homeowners.” Anuj, further added, “YoFloor shares with us the vision to let homeowners effortlessly see; through 3D visualisation technologies, a prospective design/look for their very home, before they even make the purchase. This is central to the kind of personalisation and choice we want to give to home design enthusiasts in India.”
Archit Rathi and Ankur Mishra, Co-Founders of YoFloor said, “Our team is very excited & looking forward to be a part of the Livspace family. We share the common vision of providing homeowners the ability to conceptualize their personal spaces & intend to bring virtual reality, 3D gaming and mobile technologies together into an interactive social experience. Our product & technology tools coupled with Livspace’s design community & operational capabilities will go a long way in revolutionizing the home design space.”
Commenting on Livspace’s acquisition of YoFloor, Rahul Chowdhri, Partner, Helion Ventures said, “We welcome YoFloor to the Livspace family. The two companies joining hands is highly exciting and adds immensely to Livspace’s bigger vision of bringing home design to the masses in India. We strongly believe in Livspace’s overall technology vision and – together with the YoFloor team – are thrilled about future possibilities”.
