Why We've Backed HomeRun Three Times

Walk onto a residential site in Bengaluru on a weekday morning and you will eventually see the same scene. A tiling crew is sitting on upturned buckets, not working. Nobody is being lazy but the tile adhesive ran out an hour ago, the dealer who usually supplies it said "evening," and the contractor is on his third phone call trying to find someone who will deliver four bags instead of forty.

This is the non-obvious and expensive problem in Indian construction. The labor downtime and cost overruns can cause a lot of problems:

The cost of absence

A construction worker in Karnataka would earn close to Rs. 500 a day even in rural areas (some other metro city rates run even higher). That means - a 5 person crew idle for one day burns roughly 2500 a day in wages, which is a huge cost compounded over multiple days in a project lifecycle, and this is before you count the knock-on effects: curing schedules slip, the plumber booked for Thursday gets pushed to next week, and the homeowner's move-in date quietly moves too.

Indian construction professionals know what derails a project, and late material delivery comes out as the single biggest cause of delay. Construction is also one of the few industries where productivity has barely moved in decades. A lot of that gap is spent waiting.

The top-up is not an edge case. It is the business.

Every construction or renovation project runs on an estimate, and every estimate is wrong in the same direction. Wastage, rework, a client who changes the bathroom layout in week six. The result is a steady stream of small, urgent, unplanned orders.

The existing supply chain is built to ignore exactly these orders. Materials in India typically move from brand to C&F agent to super stockist to distributor to dealer to retailer, and every layer is optimised for volume, not urgency. The distributor wants a truckload. The dealer wants the contractor who buys every month on credit. The homeowner who needs three bags of white cement and one sheet of ply by noon is the least attractive customer in the entire system, so they get the worst service. When we visited traditional building-material stores, shopkeepers were reluctant to commit prices in writing, quotes shifted on follow-up calls, and "delivery" meant sometime between a few hours and tomorrow.

The category everyone digitised around

India's building materials market is worth roughly $45Bn. Yet only about 2% of building materials are bought online, compared with 30% for phones, electronics and appliances.

Meanwhile, India learned to expect an hour. Quick commerce has become a $10-billion-plus habit for 30 million people a month. The one category where an hour genuinely saves money was left out.

There is a reason. Quick commerce was built on light baskets and two-wheelers; Blinkit's average order value was Rs. 669 in Q1 FY26. A 50 kg bag of cement doesn't ride on a scooter, and a sheet of 18 mm plywood doesn't fit a grocery rack. Heavy SKUs need different stores, different vehicles, different unloading and different pricing. The grocery playbook doesn't port over; it has to be rebuilt from the ground up. That difficulty is precisely why we believe whoever wins here gets to keep what they build.

What HomeRun built

HomeRun delivers construction and renovation materials, including cement, plywood, electrical, plumbing, hardware, adhesives and finishing products, within 60-90 minutes through a hyperlocal, tech-enabled retail network, with upfront pricing.

Some choices convinced us that this could be a large business, and not just a feature

1. It turned weight into an advantage. The same thing that keeps grocery apps out of this category makes every HomeRun order worth delivering: a typical basket is more than ten times the size of a grocery order.
2. It found frequency in projects. A homeowner may renovate once a decade, but while the project is live, the orders keep coming. A contractor running five sites never stops.
3. It refused to become a lender. Informal credit is the glue that binds contractors to dealers, and it is also what sinks distributors when collections slip. HomeRun runs prepaid, and it has grown rapidly without offering credit.

Why Pukhraj

Pukhraj Grewal didn't find this problem on a market map. He previously co-founded companies in the exact same space, which is an irreplaceable skill set to have; he has been the contractor on the phone at 11AM and done everything on both sides of the table

What earned our conviction was how sharp, iterative and operationally smart Pukhraj and the entire HomeRun team were. They built a business around where the pain was sharpest, kept the team lean and operated in a complex and completely new space like it was something that they had been doing for years. Execution velocity is the hardest thing to fake in an operations business, and it was visible on every visit.

That's why Titan Capital co-led HomeRun's seed round in November 2025, and why we have come back in every round since: first in the Series A, and again in the Series A+ this August. We double down on the founder, the team and when the thesis is playing out in front of us, and with HomeRun, all boxes check out.

The reframe

Quick commerce apps taught India to expect deliveries in an hour at most. HomeRun is betting that the people building India's homes deserve the same. We think the most important quick-commerce companies of the next decade may not look like quick commerce at all. They will look like whatever an entire industry is still waiting on.

So here is the question worth sitting with: which other industry is paying for the hour it spends waiting?