Crib App Acquires CirclePe to Introduce Zero-Deposit Renting and Upfront Operator Financing in Co-Living Market
Gurugram, July 1, 2026: Crib App (“Crib”), the AI-powered property management platform for co-living spaces, hostels, and PGs, today announced it has acquired CirclePe, a rent financing company that lets tenants rent without a security deposit and pays operators their rent in advance. The acquisition pairs Crib’s property management platform with CirclePe’s financing engine, letting tenants move in with no security deposit while coliving operators receive their rent upfront. The combination brings embedded finance directly into the rental lifecycle, freeing up working capital for operators to grow their businesses, Crib said in a press release.
CirclePe was founded by Navan Jaiswal and Ankur Yadav. In May 2024, the company was valued at ₹35 crore during its pre-seed funding round, when it successfully raised close to ₹7.5 crore. The round was led by OTP Ventures, with participation from 1947 Rise, iSeed, IIT Delhi, Venture Catalysts, and a group of prominent angel investors and entrepreneurs, including founders and CXOs from OfBusiness, BharatPe, Uni Cards, OYO, and other leading companies. The acquisition of CirclePe by Crib brings both products together under one roof.
Rental housing is one of the largest untapped opportunities for embedded finance in India. Tenants routinely lock up months of savings in security deposits, while operators wait on month-by-month collections to fund expansion. CirclePe closes that gap by partnering with NBFCs to finance the deposit or rent commitment, disbursing upfront to the operator while the tenant repays in smaller monthly amounts.
Under the new arrangement, a security deposit, which is usually the biggest cheque a tenant writes when moving in, will no longer sit idle for the length of the stay. With CirclePe, tenants on participating properties can move in with zero deposit and instead pay a small monthly amount on top of their rent.
What makes this more than a feature is where it sits. Crib already powers the complete rental journey for more than 2,500 operators managing over a billion dollars in rent, covering inventory, agreements, onboarding, invoicing, collections, renewals, and move-outs. That gives Crib three layers most fintech products never get to own: the distribution layer, the operational data layer, and the technical infrastructure.
Rather than building a disconnected external journey, Crib can embed financing natively into the platform operators already run their business on. It also creates a data advantage that compounds over time as Crib sees real payment behavior, move-out history, occupancy trends, and property performance. This provides the kind of signals that build a proprietary underwriting and trust layer traditional lenders and standalone fintechs do not have access to.
Commenting on the acquisition Sunny Garg, Co-Founder and CEO of Crib 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.”
Ankur Yadav, Co-Founder of CirclePe said, “We started CirclePe because the deposit 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.”
For co-living and PG operators, acquiring and furnishing buildings, plus slow rent cycles, tie up working capital that could be funding new beds and new properties. CirclePe pays operators their rent upfront and finances the deposit gap, so operators get predictable cash in hand instead of money stuck across hundreds of tenant accounts. The combined entity has already rolled out this growth-capital product across multiple operators, including Housr, Blossom Stayz, Kots World, and Livstations.
