- Real estate technology company HomeLight announced it has raised $109 million. With this funding round, it is getting into mortgage lending.
San Francisco-based HomeLight announced it has raised $109 million in debt and equity funding. This funding round includes $63 million in Series C funding and $46 million in debt financing for its mortgage operations.
Zeev Ventures led the funding round. And Group 11, Menlo Ventures, Crosslink Capital, Stereo Capital, and several others also participated. Including this round of funding, HomeLight has raised around $164 million in funding total according to Crunchbase.
Initially, HomeLight started out by using artificial intelligence to match consumers and real estate investors with agents. But now the company is also able to provide title and escrow services to agents and home sellers. Plus it matches sellers with iBuyers. Earlier this year, HomeLight acquired Eave in order to get into the mortgage lending business.
HomeLight was founded in 2012 by CEO Drew Uher. Uher was inspired to launch the company after experiencing the difficulties of trying to buy a home in the Bay Area market.
Uher was still even overwhelmed by the home buying process despite being a graduate from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and after working on Wall Street, meaning he was financially savvy.
“The process of buying a home in San Francisco was so frustrating it made me want to bang my head against the wall,” said Uher in an interview with Crunchbase. “I realized there was so many things wrong with the real estate industry. I went through a few real estate agents before finding the right match. So when I did find one, it made me feel empowered to compete and win against the other buyers.”
HomeLight taps into machine learning algorithms to analyze 40 million real estate transactions and more than 1.4 million agent profiles. Now HomeLight connects clients to a real estate agent every two minutes on average. And the platform has driven more than $17 billion of real estate business nationwide.
Group 11 founding partner Dovi Frances pointed out that the firm has been investing in HomeLight since the seed stage. And the firm invested in HomeLight in each round since then.
And Zeev Ventures managing director Oren Zeev pointed out that HomeLight’s evolution from a “single product company to a real estate platform aligns with our vision for the future of real estate.”
As of right now, HomeLight has more than 200 employees — up from 100 around this time last year. And its revenue has been growing around 145% for the last 3 years. HomeLight also has offices in Scottsdale, Arizona; Seattle, Washington; and New York.
