Crib Acquires Rent Financing Firm CirclePe

Crib, a Bengaluru-based AI-powered property management platform for co-living spaces, hostels and PGs has acquired rent financing firm CirclePe for an undisclosed sum.

Founded by Navan Jaiswal and Ankur Yadav, CirclePe had raised INR 7.5 crore in pre-seed funding at a valuation of INR 35 crore. The OTP Ventures-led funding round saw participation from 1947 Rise, iSeed, IIT Delhi, Venture Catalysts and founders and CXOs from OfBusiness, BharatPe, Uni Cards, OYO and others.

Following the acquisition of CirclePe, Crib tenants on participating properties can move in with zero deposit and instead pay a small monthly amount on top of their rent. It also promises no large upfront cheque, no waiting at move-out to get the deposit back.

Crib notes that it can now embed financing natively into the platform operators already run their business on. It also creates a data advantage that compounds over time. Crib sees real payment behavior, move-out history, occupancy trends and property performance the kind of signals that build a proprietary underwriting and trust layer traditional lenders and standalone fintechs simply don’t have access to.

Crib is founded by Sunny Garg (CEO), Shaifali Jain (COO) and Archit Chauhan (CTO). The platform, as mentioned above, provides a property management platform for co-living spaces, hostels and PGs. It works with more than 2,500 operators who together manage over a billion dollars in rent.

Crib, has so far, raised a total of approximately USD 3.64 million across 7 funding rounds. It is also backed by a network of over 33 institutional and 35 angel investors.

Commenting on the acquisition Crib CEO and cofounder Garg said: “Deposits are the most broken part of renting in India. Tenants lock up cash they can’t use and operators wait on money that’s already theirs. We built Crib to run the rails for co-living, and CirclePe fixes how money moves on top of them. Bringing them together means a tenant can move in with zero deposit and an operator can get paid upfront, on the same platform. That’s the future of renting we want to build.”

Yadav, cofounder of CirclePe, added, “We started CirclePe because the deposi: is a tax on moving. Tenants lose access to their own money. Joining Crib gives us the one thing a financing product needs most: scale and trust with operators who are already running their rent on the platform. Now a tenant can skip the deposit entirely and an operator gets paid upfront, on day one, on a platform they already use.”