foundd
Buying a home is supposed to be the biggest decision of your life. But the way you're forced to find one feels like nothing has been designed for the actual choice you're making.
You don't really know what you want, not in the language of filters anyway. You know it in feelings. A flat with morning light. A neighborhood where your kids can walk to school. Somewhere you'd want to grow old. A building with the kind of people you'd nod to in the lift. A balcony you'd sit on with chai. Most of what matters about a home isn't on a checkbox.
But every place that promises to help you find one asks you to think in checkboxes. 1BHK, 2BHK, 3BHK. Under 1Cr, 1-2Cr, 2-3Cr. Filter by area, sort by price, page 1 of 247. The interface flattens the decision into a database query. You scroll through hundreds of listings looking for something that almost never matches what you actually want, because what you actually want isn't structured data. It's a way of life.
Then there's the deeper problem. The current platforms aren't really about new projects at all. They're flooded with resale units, broker listings, individual flats. A builder launching a 200-unit project in Andheri gets buried under 4,000 single-flat listings from agents trying to flip secondary inventory. If you're trying to find the new tower being built next to your office, or the small 30-unit boutique project that just broke ground in Bandra, you can't. The information exists. It's just unfindable.
The RERA database has every project. The builders' websites have every photo. The information is out there. But it's scattered across thousands of pages, none of which talk to each other, none of which let you ask the question you actually want to ask, which is something like I want to live near my parents in Borivali, in a building that's quiet, with neighbors who'd be friends, and I have about 2.5 crore.
So we built foundd.
You type what you're looking for, in the actual words you use when you talk to your spouse about it. foundd reads that and shows you three projects that fit.
Behind the scenes, we've curated every active residential project in Mumbai. Real ones, with real construction underway, listed on RERA, with units actually available. We wrote a description of each one, not the marketing copy, but a real description of what the project is, who it's for, what living there would feel like. Then we let you search those descriptions semantically, the way you'd describe the home to a friend.
You can also adjust. Swap a number for a feeling. Add a constraint, remove one. Save what you liked and come back next month when something new launches that fits better. Because finding a home isn't a single search. It's a long, slow conversation with a city about where you'd like to belong.
We're starting with Mumbai because that's where the problem is densest. Thousands of new projects, scattered across hundreds of neighborhoods, each with its own character. If we can make sense of Mumbai, every other Indian city is easier.
Buying a home shouldn't feel like searching a database. It should feel like describing your life to someone who knows the city, and being shown three places where that life could happen.
That's what we're trying to build.
with Sandeep Khanna ยท an experiment by Halfwrong