How startups are turning India’s home interiors into a DIY marketplace

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. MUMBAI: As Indian homeowners become more involved in choosing how their homes look and what goes into them, investors are beginning to back startups that focus not on designing entire interiors, but on helping consumers directly discover and buy materials, bypassing traditional interior designers and full-stack execution firms. Early-stage investors see the materials-led interiors segment as a large, under-utilized opportunity, estimated at about $14 billion, with rising consumer spend and no clear market leader.

This shift is playing out even as large, late-stage cheques continue to flow into end-to-end interior platforms. Capital is now spreading across different layers of the interiors value chain, with early-stage investors increasingly betting that organizing the materials layer—tiles, laminates, wallpapers and panels—could become a large standalone opportunity. In an example, Stellaris Venture Partners, along with Accel, has invested $10 million in a Series A round in Material Depot, a Bengaluru-based platform focused on interior and decorative materials, executives from the firm said in an interview with Mint.

“Traditionally, this has been a very unorganised category, run by small family-owned shops. Nobody was solving discovery for the modern Indian consumer," said Manish Reddy, co-founder of Material Depot, on Wednesday. Founded in 2022 by Reddy and co-founder Sarthak Agarwal, the company aims to organize categories such as tiles, laminates, wallpapers and wall panels, among others.