The Land Bankers Raises Rs 8 Crore Seed: NestAway Co-Founder Amarendra Sahu Backed by Rainmatter and Kunal Shah
He built a rental platform. It ended in a legal battle and an FIR. Now Amarendra Sahu is back, this time fixing the deeper rot beneath the property market: India’s broken, opaque, dispute-ridden land ownership system. And Zerodha’s Rainmatter just wrote a cheque.
Anyone who has tried to buy land in India knows the specific anxiety that accompanies every step of the process. The document that cannot be verified. The title that turns out to have a dispute attached to it from a transaction that happened decades ago. The lawyer who says it looks clean and the other lawyer who disagrees. The registration office visit that requires knowing someone who knows someone. And the quiet, gnawing possibility that the paperwork, however carefully assembled, will one day be challenged in a court of law.
Amarendra Sahu has seen enough of how broken systems can destroy value quickly. He co-founded NestAway in 2015, helped build it into one of India’s largest home rental platforms, and then watched his exit from the company dissolve into a legal dispute that ended with him filing an FIR against NestAway’s investors, including Tiger Global, Goldman Sachs and Chiratae Ventures, as well as two of his own co-founders, alleging cheating, forgery and criminal breach of trust. That chapter is part of his public record. What he chose to do next is more interesting than the dispute itself.
He built The Land Bankers, a proptech platform that addresses the foundational problem sitting beneath almost every broken real estate transaction in India: land ownership is opaque, records are fragmented, disputes are common, and the average buyer has almost no reliable way to verify what they are actually buying before they pay for it. The platform aggregates land records, conducts title verification, runs dispute checks, connects users with legal assistance, and monitors properties for changes over time, all through a single digital interface.
The seed round closed in October last year with 1,597 compulsorily convertible preference shares issued at Rs 49,764 each. Rainmatter, the investment arm of Zerodha backed by Nithin Kamath, led the round with Rs 6 crore. Ashish Gupta put in Rs 1 crore. K2 Capital contributed Rs 50 lakh. Kunal Shah, the founder of CRED and one of India’s most active angel investors across nearly 300 companies, invested through QED Innovations Labs. Abhishek Goyal, co-founder of Tracxn, also participated. Sahu retains the largest stake at 65.48%, a sign that he structured this raise to stay in control of the company rather than rush toward dilution.
The choice of Rainmatter as lead investor carries meaning beyond the capital. Rainmatter backs companies that sit at the intersection of technology and real-world infrastructure problems, often in categories that are genuinely difficult to commercialise precisely because the underlying systems they are trying to fix are resistant to change. Land records in India fall squarely into that category. The problem is enormous, the incumbents are mostly government offices and local brokers, and the path from product to mainstream adoption requires building trust with users who have every historical reason to be sceptical of digitised promises.
Sahu is not an obvious bet. His NestAway exit was messy and public. But the investors who have backed The Land Bankers are not people who miss publicly available information. They know the history and backed him anyway, which is its own signal. Whether The Land Bankers can build the trust layer that India’s land market has always needed is a question only time will answer. The seed capital gives it the room to start finding out.
