When Square Yards began operations in 2014, Indian real estate was still dominated by roadside brokers, classified listings, and a deep deficit of trust. Technology existed largely at the margins, useful for discovery, but irrelevant once the real transaction began. Buying a home remained an opaque, deeply human, and often anxiety-ridden process.
Eleven years later, Square Yards has quietly built what few thought possible: a full-stack, transaction-led proptech platform operating across nine countries, employing over 7,000 people, and touching nearly every layer of the real estate value chain. Last year, the company closed close to ₹1,400 crore in revenue. This year, it is chasing ₹2,000 crore. Growth remains a steady 40–50 per cent year-on-year.
But numbers, insists Vivek Agarwal, Co-founder and CTO, tell only part of the story.
“Real estate is probably the last large sector where technology hasn’t penetrated the way it has in others,” he says. “And that’s not because people didn’t try. It’s because this is a high-value, high-touch, emotional purchase. You can’t just digitise it end to end and expect humans to disappear.”
From the beginning, Square Yards chose not to be a listings company. Instead of stopping at lead generation, it leaned into the messy, unglamorous middle of the transaction, site visits, negotiations, documentation, financing, and closure.
“What happens after the enquiry is where the real complexity lies,” Agarwal explains. “Most platforms hand the lead over and step out. We decided to stay in the room till the deal is done.”
That decision shaped everything that followed.
India, Agarwal argues, is not a do-it-yourself market. It is a “do-it-for-me” economy, driven by intermediaries across sectors, from insurance to wealth management. Real estate is no different. Rather than trying to eliminate agents, Square Yards built technology to empower them.
“We don’t shy away from being a people-heavy organisation,” he says. “We have close to 7,000 employees on our rolls and another 50,000 independent agents across property and loans. My focus as CTO has always been on one thing: how do we equip this agent to be smarter, faster, and more productive?”
That philosophy led Square Yards to build its own internal ERP and CRM systems, handling everything from customer journeys and call intelligence to HR, finance, and agent performance. Every call is recorded. Every interaction is analysed. Site visits, follow-ups, and negotiations are tracked through a layer of technology that brings structure to an otherwise chaotic process.
Trust, however, remains the industry’s biggest fault line.
“Real estate is the biggest purchase most people will ever make,” Agarwal says. “Yet it’s historically been one of the lowest-trust industries. A lot of that mistrust comes from lack of transparency, around pricing, project delivery, even basic data.”
To address this, Square Yards undertook a painstaking exercise: digitising close to one million property records scattered across registrar offices, stored in different formats and languages. The goal was simple but radical, make transaction data searchable, comparable, and accessible.
“If you ask most people what properties actually sold for in their neighbourhood, they won’t know,” Agarwal says. “We wanted to change that.”
As the core platform matured, Square Yards began expanding laterally. The first adjacency was home financing. Every property sale created a mortgage requirement, and instead of outsourcing that journey, the company built Urban Money, a mortgage origination and facilitation platform that works with banks and housing finance companies.
“We don’t underwrite loans ourselves,” Agarwal clarifies. “The underwriting is done by the banks. We are a facilitator, but at massive scale.”
Today, Urban Money facilitates close to ₹90,000 crore worth of loans annually and has grown larger than Square Yards’ core real estate business in revenue terms. Interiors followed next, then rentals, property management, and B2B offerings such as data intelligence and 3D visualisation.
In 2021, Square Yards acquired a small company specialising in 3D interior visualisation. What began as virtual walkthroughs of apartments soon scaled into full digital replicas of residential complexes. Then came an unexpected pivot.
“Developers in the Middle East started pushing the boundaries,” Agarwal recalls. “They asked, if you can do this for a five-acre project, why not for an entire city?”
Today, Square Yards has built digital twins for parts of Abu Dhabi and Riyadh and is working on Dubai. These models go far beyond real estate, finding applications in urban planning, traffic management, and security.
“In India, the challenge is data quality,” he says. “High-resolution maps, satellite imagery, drone permissions, it’s all limited. In markets like Dubai, the infrastructure already exists.”
Parallel to this physical modelling runs another transformation: artificial intelligence.
Square Yards was experimenting with machine learning long before generative AI entered the mainstream. Lead scoring, propensity modelling, and intelligent routing were already in play. The recent AI wave, however, has shifted focus to voice and behaviour.
“We process millions of customer calls every month,” Agarwal says. “No human can listen to that volume. AI helps us understand intent, sentiment, preferences, things that never make it into a CRM field.”
AI now analyses calls post-interaction, coaches agents on negotiation styles, and even handles first-level lead qualification through voice bots.
“Speed matters,” Agarwal says. “If a customer is on your website and raises an enquiry, the first call often determines whether you win or lose that lead.”
The next frontier is real-time AI copilots, systems that listen in on live calls and prompt agents with contextual information, pricing data, and suggested responses.
“It’s not about replacing the human,” he emphasises. “It’s about making the human better.”
Despite automation, Square Yards does not see a future with fewer people. In fact, Agarwal believes the opposite.
“We are at just two to three per cent market share in a massive, fragmented industry,” he says. “There is room to grow into a much larger organisation, maybe even a 100,000-people company one day.”
Looking ahead, Square Yards is preparing for its next phase: wealth, insurance, and risk products, built on the back of its nationwide distribution and deep customer relationships. Lending licences and financial conglomerate ambitions are openly discussed internally.
“We already know we can build a billion-dollar company,” Agarwal says. “The real question we ask ourselves is, can we build a hundred-billion-dollar institution over the next 20 or 30 years? Something that outlasts the founders.”
In an industry long resistant to change, Square Yards is betting that technology, when paired with human judgement rather than positioned against it, can finally bring order, trust, and scale to one of the economy’s most complex sectors.