The real estate tech company HomeLight, which helps consumers find the perfect real estate agent as well as fashion all-cash deals and home trade-ins, has secured $100 million in a Series D funding round. The round elevates the company’s valuation to $1.6 billion, turning it into a so-called unicorn.
The round brings the company’s total funding to approximately $530 million.
Founded in 2012, HomeLight is, at its core, a referral platform for real estate agents. As Inman reported in December, real estate agents pay a 25 percent broker-to-broker referral fee when they close through the platform.
HomeLight’s platform allows its users to speak with several agents in their market before deciding which one to go with. It uses proprietary internal algorithm to pair them. Along with referrals, the platform also offers a variety of services including HomeLight Trade-In and HomeLight Cash Offer.
Per the company’s press release, the recent funding round was led by Zeev Ventures. Other participants included Group 11, STCAP, Menlo Ventures, and Lydia Jett from the SoftBank Vision Fund.
“After decades of stagnation in our industry, how we buy and sell homes is fundamentally changing,” Drew Uher, the founder and CEO of HomeLight, said in the release. “We’ve built the definitive platform that gives the best real estate agents and their clients the power of contingency-free transactions — whether that’s enabling an all-cash offer, unlocking liquidity of an existing home to buy a new one, or creating certainty through a modern closing process. We’ve proven that technology can help transform the transaction experience, and we couldn’t be more excited to bring that technology to top agents, homebuyers, and sellers everywhere.”
Per the release, HomeLight will use the money from the funding round to expand its platform for agents to new markets. The company currently has offices in Scottsdale, San Francisco, New York and Seattle.
“When I first led HomeLight’s Series A in 2015, I believed deeply in the team’s vision of making real estate simpler, more certain, and satisfying for everyone involved,” Oren Zeev, a founding partner at Zeev Ventures, said in the release. “Today, HomeLight has delivered on that promise and more. I’m proud to support them as they build the future of real estate transactions.”