Knock, a company that is aiming to make trading in homes easier, has raised $400 million in Series B equity and debt financing. Foundry Group led this round of funding with participation from existing investors such as RRE Ventures, Corazon Capital, WTI, and FJ Labs, and new investor Company Ventures.
With this round of funding, Knock will continue pushing forward with its nationwide expansion plans and accelerate the development of its proprietary Home Trade-in platform technology. In conjunction with this round of funding, Foundry Group partner Seth Levine is joining Knock’s board of directors.
Launched in 2015, Knock was created in order to provide greater certainty, convenience, and cost-effectiveness to the home buying and selling process. And with the additional funding, it will enable Knock to buy more homes on behalf of its customers before representing them in the sale of their old ones on the open market. Knock is now available in five markets: Atlanta, GA, Charlotte, NC, Raleigh-Durham, NC, Dallas, TX and Fort Worth, TX.
“At Knock we believe the only way to revolutionize the real estate industry is by addressing both home buying and selling, given 71% of consumers are doing both at the same time, which is why we’re creating a marketplace solution with our Home Trade-in platform,” said Knock co-founder and CEO Sean Black. “As we celebrate the success of the Trade-in with this latest round of funding, we are excited to have found investors and partners in Foundry Group, which has successfully helped other marketplace companies like Rover and Havenly scale platforms that transform traditional industries for a better, technology-powered consumer experience.”
Knock’s co-founders include Black, Jamie Glenn, and Karan Sakhuja. Black and Glenn were founding members of real estate search engine company Trulia. And Sakhuja was an executive at a few startups such as homeASAP and SportsYapper.
“At Foundry we love working with passionate founders who are on a mission to fundamentally change an industry. The Knock team is exactly that — combining years of experience in real estate technology with a fundamental drive to change the way consumers buy and sell homes,” added Levine. “This is an unstoppable combination that we believe will transform the outdated real estate industry.”
This past year, Knock rolled out several new products such as a predictive home search tool called Knock Deals. And Knock also released its National Knock Deals Forecast report — which is a predictive study of home price outcomes for on-market listings across 45 top US cities.
“By combining our platform technology with national machine learning-driven housing insights and the real life, in-home experiences of our team as we grow across the U.S., we’re bringing a level of transparency to real estate that will enable a more certain, convenient and cost-effective experience for home buyers and sellers,” explained Glenn.
Following this funding round, Knock has raised a total equity and debt to more than $600 million. The company’s investors in the Series A round raised in January 2017 included RRE Ventures, Corazon Capital, Redpoint, Greycroft, Correlation Ventures, Great Oaks Venture Capital, and FJ Labs.
