According to the founder and chief executive officer of econstructindia, Mr Chaitanya K Rajani said that the company has decided to bring in other construction companies as partners as the interest of major construction companies in the venture will attract more business transactions to the portal, he added.

"We are discussing with five major construction companies and all of them have shown keen interest in picking up equity in the venture," said Mr Rajani. However, he refused to divulge the names of the companies.Mr Rajani said though the company would need only around Rs 6 crore in its first round of funding it is expected to get much more through the sale of equity.

The company would like to associate all five players in the project as more industry players having financial interests in a portal will create bigger marketplace and higher volume of transactions, he said adding that the possibility of only one company picking up the major stake cannot be ruled out.

"If we get the right partners and right money, we would not mind offloading the mojority stake to the new partners, keeping ourselves as an investor with just 10-15 per cent equity," said Mr Rajani.

Mr Rajani claims that econstructindia is the only business to business portal in India in the construction business and has generated a good response from industry players and suppliers. The portal which was launched in October last year, will start facilitating business transactions by the end of January, Mr Rajani elaborated.

The portal will also work as an ASP to provide project management and tracking services to the construction companies, pointed out Mr Rajani.

Mr Rajani expects to cross business transactions worth Rs 150 crore through the portal in first 12 months of the operations resulting into the earning of around 0.25 per cent commission on the total transaction. Moreover, the company will also earn from ASP model on a per user per month fee basis. ``We hope to be cash positive within a year of operations,'' he said. However, the business volume will go up substantially after other major construction firms also join the portal, he added.

Econstruct Technologies, the parent company of econstructindia.com, was formed in May last year. The company later offloaded three per cent equity to Techstep, a company of Mr Milind Deora, son of Mumbai-based politician, Mr Murli Deora and 3 per cent to an NRI, Mr Vinod Gupta, founder of InfoUSA.