- Latin America-based digital real estate platform Loft has raised $175 million in Series C funding
Loft — a Latin America-based digital real estate platform that is simplifying the buying and selling of residential real estate — announced it has raised $175 million in a Series C round of funding. Vulcan Capital and Andreessen Horowitz co-led the round with participation from QED Investors, Fifth Wall Ventures, Thrive Capital, Valor Capital, Monashees and others.
The residential real estate market in Latin America is considered a $6 trillion opportunity. But the data transparency and a consolidated marketplace contributes to low-quality and redundant listings, high-asking prices, and exceedingly long-sell times thus creating a painful experience for buyers, sellers and brokers.
Launched in 2018 by founders and co-CEOs Mate Pencz and Florian Hagenbuch, Loft’s digital platform simplifies the purchase and sale of apartments by bringing improved organization, data, and efficiency to the residential real estate market.
In combining real transaction data with a proprietary machine learning model, Loft is able to price every apartment in its markets at the unit level, increasing liquidity, and transparency for buyers and sellers.
“We’re aiming to reinvent the way people move homes by building the most consumer-focused real estate marketplace,” said Pencz. “Our latest round of funding, which includes several previous investors and new ones, shows that global growth investors recognize the massive market opportunity in residential real estate across emerging markets and are confident in the long-term viability and scalability of our tech-enabled platform to power real estate transactions efficiently.”
Since being founded, Loft raised equity capital of approximately $275 million from angel investors like Max Levchin, Joe Lonsdale, Mike Krieger, and David Vélez. And Loft is the first and only investment in Latin America for Vulcan Capital and the first and only Brazilian investment for Andreessen Horowitz.
“Loft’s exponential growth over the past year makes it clear that there is a massive need in the real estate industry for more transparency and efficiency,” added Alastair (Alex) Rampell, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. “We see Loft’s technology-enabled approach as a significant investment opportunity, particularly in rapidly-growing emerging markets like Latin America, and we’re thrilled to be expanding our funding to help bring the company’s innovative platform to more markets across the region.”
Loft generated over $150 million in annualized revenues in its first full year of operation. And in 2019 alone, the company transacted on over 1,000 properties.
Loft plans to use the latest round of funding to expand across both Brazil and Latin America, starting with Rio de Janeiro in the first quarter of 2020, Mexico City in the second quarter and several other cities soon after. And in December, Loft hired Juan Pablo Ramos, former Director of Regional Operations at UberEats in Latin America as General Manager of the company’s Mexico operations.
“Loft is creating a consolidated source of truth on inventory and transaction prices that has, until now, been fundamentally missing from the Latin American real estate market. This, together with Loft’s highly accurate and intelligent pricing tools, is transforming real estate transactions and providing a truly unmatched customer experience for sellers, agents, and buyers,” explained Rafael Costa, general partner at Vulcan Capital.
And Loft is also expanding into new product categories and plans to scale its financial product lines, including mortgages and insurance significantly in 2020. Loft started in 2019 with 100 employees and has grown to over 450 since then with plans to reach over 550 by the first quarter of 2020.
