We can achieve almost everything we need with the help of technological applications. From ordering food to booking hotel rooms, we have found easy and very transparent ways of business. BuildNext offers a transparent way of building your dream home. It is a complete Design and Build Company with a technology back end coupled with material supply as well.
Give a brief info about your startup?
Gopikrishnan V, a gold medal-winning architect from IIT-Kharagpur, and Finaz Naha, computer science engineer from NIT-Calicut, and batchmates at IIM-Bengaluru, founded BuildNext in 2015.
BuildNext is an IT Enabled Construction Company, founded with the aim of providing hassle free, transparent and quality assured experience to Customers in the Building Construction Sector.
What made you start your startup, was there any particular incident that led to it?
Nowadays we have technology to assist us in our day to day lives, like if we need to travel we use multiple platforms to check the commutation services and prices, – to book a place of stay, order food, get appointment with doctors, transfer money, get jobs – for all our basic needs we have multiple technology platforms that can guide us and help us. But everyone’s primary need or dream is to have a place of their own or build a dream home towards which we spend most of our life’s savings. It is the biggest expenditure of all and in the current market, we do not have any technology that can give the transparency or guidance as for other products or services. That’s where BuildNext comes in.
Construction is one of the biggest industries in the world and one of the most unorganized. If you take anyone, individual or a builder, they all have been facing or faced issues from project inception to handover due to mismanagement, lack of transparency or data and cost escalation to name a few. This being one of the biggest industries, there is an acute need for a platform or solution that can bring in the kind of transparency and data to boost the customer experience. We are here to do that.
Why would people prefer to buy building materials online as compared to getting them from the market?
BuildNext is not just an online supplier of Construction materials we have another vertical which we introduced into the market, the BuildNext IT enabled Construction Company, focusing on end to end construction. And we do it, by understanding the customer requirements in design stage and creating their dream home/project in a virtual world using our BuildNext Virtual Reality tech. Once they have walked through their dream home and are satisfied with the virtual model, we onboard the project to BuildNext Pro Tool and it will give the customer the exact Bill of Quantities (BoQ) using which we will be building their home or project, thus providing the exact cost that’s needed to construct the project. We provide our projects with 10 year Structural Warranty and 1 year free service warranty. They can track timelines, quality checks, site progress etc via our mobile app.
Where is your startup based out of? Why do you think that is the best place for you?
We are headquartered in Kochi and have started our operations in Hyderabad and will very soon go live in Vizag.
We are planning to expand to Pune, NCR, Bangalore and Coimbatore by the end of this year.
Kerala was the ideal market for us in the initial stages because of the mass residential market and expenditure on buildings is generally higher compared to other markets. Also we have now expanded to one of the most booming cities in India, Hyderabad. We have a pipeline of INR 150 Cr Projects and looking to close more than INR 100 Cr projects in Hyderabad in the next 6 months.
Who are your competitions and how are you better than them?
There are some players who offer branded construction now, but we do not have anyone in the market right now, combining process with cutting edge tech and data analytics to improve CX like we do. We are cheaper, faster and better than any other Construction Company in the market and we provide our customers with more transparent and quality adhered construction process.
Tell us about your team and how did you meet each other?
Gopikrishan V and Finaz Naha are the founders, Nirmal George is the Head of Operations, Dileep PG is the CTO which comprises the core team of BuildNext.
Gopi and Finaz are batchmates from IIM, Nirmal was their junior in IIM Bangalore and worked with Finaz at Amazon. Dileep and Finaz studied computer science together at NITC.
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