Agya Ventures revenue, CEO Kunal Lunawat, team size, customer count, churn, and more in 2023.

hey folks my guest today is kunal lunavet he's building a company called agya ventures it's helping it's he's built the fun to invest in the future of the built world kunal you're ready to take the top awesome thanks for having me over nathan you bet thanks for coming on so just be clear this is not a sas company you're building a fund correct that's right it's an early stage pc fund okay and are you investing in any sas companies focused on the space or no right uh so we're investing in seed and series a stage companies focused on real estate a part of that could be sas business models that we'd look at and have you deployed any capital to date in sas companies focused on real estate correct we made five investments so far and two or two of them are sas companies great tell me more about the fun did you come as a you know were you an operator you sold and then you you launched the fund or you have always been sort of on the fun side uh no it's been it's been an interesting journey to this point nathan um so i grew up in india my dad's a first-time entrepreneur he's a real estate developer back in india so kind of grew up in that environment uh came stateside for college and then my first job out of college was at blackstone real estate uh so made a bunch of real estate right equity investments there across different asset classes i went to business school after that at that point i got more interested in product and tech uh then helped out a couple of friends with their prop tech companies and then eventually um by happenstance i i got a call by a japanese real estate developer to help them run their corporate venture capital arm base of tokyo they were looking to do more things in the us uh this was in 2019 so i went visited tokyo spoke to this company and kind of got connected to two more institutions and they wanted me to do the same thing which is helped their cvcs gain more exposure to us based prop tag so at that point i kind of built out this consulting business which was the first iteration of archaea ventures as the business kind of kept growing at that point i convinced my now co-founder and gp in the fund nobu who is my classmate in business school to join the team so we kept on building the consulting side of the business and last year we went back to some of our japanese institutional clients and they participated as lps in the fund so kind of fast forward to today we spend i would say 75 to 80 of our time as a team on the fun side and the remaining 20 of our time on the consulting side how large is the consulting business what was revenue in 2020 just on that that part of the company uh it was a little less than half a million dollars okay got it so it's really more of an excuse for you to get connected to these folks while you focus on the fund exactly interesting now did you and your partner split were you friendly did you just split carry 50 50 or how do you how do you do that when you launch a fund how do you talk about carry splits sure um so it's um you know there are a few things that you need to bear in mind it's the uh it's the amount of work that's already been put in um it's the experience in the background that you're bringing to the table um and it's the optional cost of each founder uh for kind of you know leaving their existing jobs to start something like this uh bear in mind that the you know the the cad interest for fund one may not be the same as that for one two because by the time you're looking at front door it's more more more of an established vehicle so you know the economics might change at that point so how much did you guys raise for fund one are we still raising so we are not allowed to disclose uh but we're looking at a 45 to 50 million dollar fund uh ballpark we're 50 on the way there and are you selling sort of the you know two and twenty model you're selling sort of forty five percent irr is there a fixed hurdle or something unique about it it is a two and twenty model um and um it's pretty market standard in that perspective okay let's talk more about now we understand a function let's talk more about real estate and there's a lot of folks saying you know obviously the fed is printing money actually most world banks are now printing money like crazy and you've got large private equity firms like blackstone actually sort of buying up the american dream storing money in real estate many people are saying for the consumer owning a home is dead prices are too high because these funds are bidding it up you have some experience here is the american dream dead owning a home uh well what we see is actually quite the opposite um last year um you know was the best year for residential home sales in in the last 15 years or so uh mortgage rates are at an all-time low um there is some concern that you know institutional buyers are crowding out the individual homeowner uh but all said and done we still think that you know there's space for everyone to operate and we're seeing home ownership levels go up you quoted residential home sales but how do you split out the buyers of those residential homes into cohorts consumers like you and i versus big funds institutional funds buying it isn't isn't that a bad proxy to use just pure residential home sales true that's a good point um and really if you want to slice and dice it more nathan you know there's the individual homeowner that's buying a home for the first time there's an individual homeowner that's buying a vacation rental or a second time home as a rental property and then among the funds you've got the you know small to mid-sized funds that are buying anywhere between 2200 assets and then you've got you know the large price equity funds that are buying 10 000 assets at time um so you've got the whole spectrum uh there are certain markets for sure where the large price equity funds are buying you know thousands of assets and that's crowding out the market but uh even then if you look at like the total volume of residential sales across the us that's still a fraction of the total market so to say that you know large real estate bracket refunds are kind of dominating the u.s home residential market i think would be factually incorrect do you believe we're an inflationary environment with so much money floating around and you're that's why we're seeing these crazy asset prices i do believe that you're seeing some indications of inflationary trends uh but at the same time you know from a macro perspective you've never seen anything like this before the rate at which vets printed money interest rates at an all-time low so there's something we said about maybe this is the new normal yep interesting okay how is all of this funding a thesis a core belief you have about property and then how is that determining and how is that guiding you in terms of where are you playing capital in the prop tech companies um i think you know last year uh was kind of a watershed here for us and prof tech some of the trends that we've been looking at kind of got accelerated by more than 10 years and to give you a sense you know we divide real estate across a few different asset classes so when you look at office uh this whole trend around healthy buildings and technology promoting healthy buildings has been accelerated when you look at you know residential um the one one underlying theme that we're backing pretty strongly is community and having a sense of community and multi-family properties and any technology that kind of promotes that when you look at hospitality i mean the hotel sector was really badly hit you had occupancy levels at all time lows across major markets in the u.s and usually it's during those points where the propensity to adopt technology is at an all-time high among property managers and hotel owners and operators if you look at retail brick and mortar retail almost you know was again struggling so anything that brings people back to malls and makes it more experiential and technology that drives it is something we are bullish on on the flip side of retail struggling nathan was e-commerce was on fire and as a result you know you barely had any spaces in warehouses so we had warehouse owners and operators come to us asking us for technology product uh that would make these warehouses more efficient so that's that's what we've been looking at you know across the five to six different asset classes in real estate have you made a bet there and then specifically in the warehouse space making it more efficient and if so what was the company you wrote a check into we're actively looking at the space we haven't made a bet yet okay where happy place bets you've written five checks i think sure um so we've invested in the hospitality space we've invested uh in the senior living space we've written two checks in the residential space uh and then we run one check in the retail space can you show are any of these public already can you share the story of these companies and what they're doing sure uh we can share um uh we can share four of the five okay let's see can you show the senior living one yeah sure um so actually that's the one that's uh that's on the stealth so yeah okay what about what's about one of the residential checks one of one of the two checks there yeah uh happy to talk about both of them so one of the companies was the name of the company's rumor r-u-m-r um great founder's story the founder's name is jordan allen he was previously the...