OpenDoor
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SoftBank makes mountains of cash off of human laziness
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
Natasha and Danny and Alex and Grace were all here to chat through the week’s biggest tech happenings. It was yet another crazy week, but we did our best to get through as much of it as we could. Here’s the rundown, in case you are reading along with us!
- Square is buying Tidal in a deal that some are skeptical of, but one about which we found quite a lot to like.
- How capital-as-a-service can get you your first check in 2021, and a nod to Indie.VC, a pioneer in alternative financing for startups that announced it is shutting down net new investments this year.
- Oscar Health priced its IPO above its raised range, which was good for it in terms of fundraising. However, since its debut the company has lost pricing altitude. Its declines mimic those of other public neo-insurance providers in what could be a new trend.
- And sticking to the insurtech beat, Hippo is going public via a SPAC. Because everyone else is?
- Compass filed its S-1, which triggered a debate on how it’s different than Opendoor.
- Coupang’s IPO is also coming, replete with huge growth, an improving profitability picture and a massive valuation. This is one to watch.
- There was also a whole global news circuit around grocery delivery startups, with Instacart raising at a $39 billion valuation.
- And we wrapped with the Surreal seed round that we found to be more than a little spicy. As it turns out, commercialized deepfakes are not merely on the way; they are here.
And with that we are back on Monday. Have a rocking weekend!
Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PST, Wednesday, and Friday at 6:00 AM PST, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts!
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Schools are closing their doors, but Opendoor isn’t
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast (now on Twitter!), where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
This week Natasha Mascarenhas, Danny Crichton and myself hosted a live taping at Disrupt for a digital reception. It was good fun, though of course we’re looking forward to bringing the live show back to the conference next year, vaccine allowing.
Thankfully we had Chris Gates behind the scenes tweaking the dials, Alexandra Ames fitting us into the program and some folks to watch live.
What did we talk about? All of this (and some very, very bad jokes):
- The Great American SPAC-Off: As both Opendoor and Desktop Metal approach the public markets on the wings of SPACs, we ask why. And why we have to keep talking about SPACs, which we do not want to do.
- But the public markets are hot and active, with companies like JFrog and Snowflake going public to great effect. JFrog had a great IPO. Snowflake had an insane IPO.
- But there was a lot of action from the private markets as well, including Airtable raising $185 million, ApplyBoard raised a $55 million extension and Tonal raised $110 million, because connected fitness is hotter than SaaS at the moment.
- We also riffed on Natasha’s venture trends’ piece, digging into how to get to conviction in a remote-only world. As it turns out, we have notes on video games.
- And there were two new funds, including one from the Chainsmokers (hot, fun, great) and another from Greylock (traditional, Victorian and huge). In more serious commentary, the Greylock raise continues the mega-fund era.
And then we tried to play a game that may or may not make it into the final cut. Either way, it was great to have Equity back at Disrupt. More to come. Hugs from us!
Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PT and Thursday afternoon as fast as we can get it out, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.
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Unicorn layoffs keep piling up as the economy gets worse
Earlier today a grip of new data presented a sharply negative picture of the American economy. And this afternoon, news broke that a trio of well-known, heavily-backed unicorns were cutting staff.
With stocks down as well, we’ve received negative signals from the private market, the public market and the economy as a whole in the same day. Let’s take a minute to set the macro stage, and then go over the latest cuts from Carta (first reported by Bloomberg), Zume (Business Insider broke that particular story) and Opendoor (via The Information).
Economic malaise
The backdrop for today’s cuts is a faltering American economy. A glance at recent news is sufficient. In the last few hours, home builder confidence recorded the “biggest drop in history,” while retail sales fell 8.7% in March, what CNBC noted was “the most ever in government data,” and CNN Business reported that American factories’ output fell 5.4% in March, “their steepest one-month slowdown since 1946.”
It’s perhaps no surprise, then, that we’ve seen unicorn layoffs all year. In January the news was Vision Fund-backed companies cutting burn to skate closer to profitability. Then, the first round of COVID-19-forced staff cuts landed at big companies; firms like Bird and TripActions slashed staff as their companies were rent by a slowdown in their core operations by the pandemic and its related economic and social changes.
Slimmer cuts at smaller companies have happened on a nearly chronic basis, something that TechCrunch has covered, as well.
Today, however, saw three cuts from three unicorns (private companies worth $1 billion or more) that have long been objects of TechCrunch’s attention. So, let’s talk about them briefly:
- Opendoor, a San Francisco-based home sales-focused startup with backing from SoftBank, announced deep cuts to its staffing today. In a statement provided to TechCrunch, the company’s CEO Eric Wu said that 35% of its employee base would be eliminated to “ensure that we can continue to deliver on our mission.” The CEO also said that exiting staff would get paid for eight weeks and “reimbursement of 16 weeks of health insurance coverage.” Wu is also donating his 2020 salary to a fund to support staff. Opendoor was most recently valued at $3.8 billion in a $300 million funding round announced last March.
- Carta, a San Francisco-based private company equity service platform, announced cuts worth 16% of its staff, or 161 roles, according to a memo that the company shared publicly. Previously eShares, Carta has grown from a provider of equity management for small private companies into a larger, broader service and software play supporting yet-private firms. Carta most recently raised $300 million at a $1.7 billion valuation last May.
- And finally, Zume. Zume didn’t respond to a request for comment by the time of publication and did not post a public note that we could find. Still, Business Insider reports that the company is cutting 200 more staff after earlier 2020 personnel reductions. The firm will be left with around 100 employees, working on compostable boxes. Zume last raised $375 million at a valuation of just under $1.9 billion (post-money) in November 2018.
It’s getting hard to keep track of all the cuts. Heck, I helped break Modsy layoffs recently with TechCrunch’s Natasha Mascarenhas, and we were first to the BounceX cuts as well. It’s a rough, bad economy, and it’s harming growth-oriented companies that like startup unicorns.
More when we have it, probably sooner than we’d like to report.
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Opendoor appoints CFO, CPO
Opendoor has named Gautam Gupta its chief financial officer and chief business officer, critical roles as the business continues to alter the way in which homes are bought and sold. Uber’s former head of finance, Gupta joined the $3.8 billion home-selling platform as its chief operating officer in 2017.
The company, which has raised more than $4 billion in debt and equity funding to date, is announcing several new hires this morning. Venrock’s Tom Willerer has joined as the company’s first-ever chief product officer. Willerer previously led product at Coursera and Netflix. He joined the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Venrock in 2017 and has since struck deals with edtech startups including Make School and Flockjay.
Opendoor has also hired Julie Todaro as its president of homes and services, another newly created role. Todaro, who spent more than a decade at Amazon, most recently as its vice president of consumer electronics, will oversee market operations, customer experience and home services.
Finally, Carrie Wheeler, a partner at TPG for 20 years, and Jason Kilar, the founding CEO of Hulu, have joined Opendoor’s board of directors.
Founded in 2014, San Francisco-based Opendoor is backed by General Atlantic, Hawk Equity, SoftBank, Access Technology Ventures, Lennar Corporation, Fifth Wall Ventures, SV Angel, Norwest Venture Partners, NEA, GGV Capital, Khosla Ventures, GV and more.
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Flat, a Mexican property tech startup, raises $4.6M pre-seed led by ALLVP
Flat has raised one of Mexico’s largest pre-seed rounds to take the Opendoor real estate marketplace model across the Rio Grande.
The company snagged a $4.5 million pre-seed round to expand its business helping homeowners quickly sell their properties in Mexico. The round was led by ALLVP, an active early-stage fund in Mexico. California-based Liquid 2 Ventures (for which Hall of Fame quarterback Joe Montana is a GP), NextBillion and a few angels supported the round, as well.
At the time of writing, Flat’s raise is the largest pre-seed funding round for a Mexican startup aside from the scooter company, Grin, which was backed by Y Combinator and later went on to raise a $45 million Series A and consolidate with Brazil’s bike-sharing startup, Yellow.
While this ‘i-buying’ business model was initially pioneered by Opendoor in the U.S., the same need to efficiently sell property exists for consumers in other growing markets around the world. That’s why co-founders Victor Noguera and Bernardo Cordero founded Flat.
Bucking a trend that has seen many new Latin American founders hailing from Stanford University, Cordero and Noguera met at the University of California, Berkeley — just across the bay.
The founders estimate the total value of the 40 million homes in Mexico to be a $1.6 trillion total addressable market. They equate the value of homes sold per year to $25 billion. Let’s not forget the elephant in the room — SoftBank is undoubtedly eyeing Mexico with its $5 billion LatAm commitment.
Flat says it’s solving a few problems in the local home-buying market in Mexico. Firstly, anyone interested in selling their property lacks information about how much their home is actually worth. In the U.S., sellers can reference Zillow — but no such centralized database of real estate pricing information for the market of Mexico exists.
Then there’s the operational piece of transferring ownership of the property, which Flat says can take up to eight months and is a notarized process — making the overall experience incredibly illiquid.
Flat’s actual product is a marketplace focused on helping the seller sell quickly. Flat visits your home, takes measurements, documents how many bathrooms and bedrooms exist in the property and determines how much your home is worth. From there, they manage renovations and transfer ownership of the property. The seller is paid within 72 hours.
International expansion has been difficult for many startups operating in Latin America as every country has its own regulatory barriers. That’s why when it comes to growth, Flat says it’s more focused on growing out their product within other verticals of property management to only serve a Mexican market, rather than expand to other Spanish-language countries in the LatAm region.
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The 10 largest US venture rounds of 2018
Three U.S. companies raised more than $1 billion in just one funding round in 2018, a year in which total deal value for U.S. startups is expected to surpass $100 billion for the first time.
For the most part, it was the usual suspects, and yes, SoftBank was an accessory in many of these rounds. Here’s a look at the 10 largest venture rounds of 2018.
Epic Games: $1.25 billion
The video game Fortnite Battle Royale was the star of the year 2018; more than 200 million players worldwide are registered online. (Photo Illustration by Chesnot/Getty Images)
Given the absolute phenomenon Fortnite became in just one year from its original release, it was no surprise private investors wanted to put money into Epic Games, the company behind it. In October, Epic Games announced a whopping $1.25 billion round at $15 billion valuation from KKR, Iconiq Capital, Smash Ventures, Vulcan Capital, Kleiner Perkins and Lightspeed Venture Partners to continue growing its Fortnite empire. That game alone is expected to bring in $2 billion in revenue in 2018 and reports 200 million registered players — not too shabby.
Cary, N.C.-based Epic Games’ monstrous fundraise was a standout in a year when funding for gaming and esports startups really took off. According to Crunchbase, global venture investment in the industry increased nearly 75 percent, to $701 million in the first half of 2018. Given Epic’s round, Discord’s $150 million infusion of capital this week and several others since June, the second half of 2018 undoubtedly set major records in the space.
Uber: $1.2 billion
Travis Kalanick, co-founder and former chief executive officer of Uber Technologies Inc., speaks during the TiE Global Entrepreneurs Summit in New Delhi, India, on Friday, December 16, 2016. Kalanick said the company will introduce Uber Moto across India. Photographer: Udit Kulshrestha/Bloomberg via Getty Images
One of the largest rounds of 2018 was also one of the first big financings of the year. To be fair, the negotiations behind Uber’s $1.2 billion SoftBank investment and much of the press coverage surrounding it came in 2017, but the deal officially closed in January. This deal was monumental for many reasons. First of all, it made Uber founder and former chief executive officer Travis Kalanick a billionaire — not just on paper — and it cemented SoftBank’s position as the ride-hailing giant’s largest shareholder.
The financing brought San Francisco-based Uber’s total raised to date to just over $20 billion at a valuation said to be around $72 billion. Of course, Uber has since privately filed for an initial public offering slated for the first quarter of 2019.
Juul Labs: $1.2 billion
Juul Labs, the maker of the popular e-cigarette brand that has recently come under fire from health officials over its popularity with young adults, plans to introduce a line of lower-nicotine pods. Photographer: Gabby Jones/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Juul, one of the buzziest companies of 2018, raised $1.2 billion from private investors Tiger Global, Fidelity and more in mid-2018. Then, this month, the developer of e-cigarettes popular among teenagers accepted a $12.8 billion investment from the makers of Marlboro that valued it at $38 billion. Not only has Juul created significant controversy surrounding the ethics, or lack thereof, of its core product and its marketing to the younger generation in a short time, but it has also accumulated value at a clip rarely seen before. Juul, for context, surpassed a $10 billion valuation just seven months after its first round of VC backing — that’s four times faster than Facebook.
2019 is poised to be an interesting year for San Francisco-based Juul as it navigates public scrutiny, regulations and the completion of its partnership with Altria Group, which, according to Juul’s CEO Kevin Burns, will “help accelerate [Juul’s] success switching adult smokers.”
Magic Leap: $963M
Magic Leap’s flagship product, the Magic Leap One AR headset, began shipping to consumers this year.
It wouldn’t be an end of the year round-up of the largest VC deals without any mention of Magic Leap, the extremely well-funded virtual reality company. Tucked away in Plantation, Fla., 8-year-old Magic Leap has closed round after round, raising more than $2 billion to develop its hardware and software. The key investors in this year’s big round, which valued the company at $6.3 billion, were Temasek and AT&T, which announced it would become the exclusive “wireless distributor” of Magic Leap products in the U.S. starting this summer. Magic Leap is also backed by Google, Alibaba and Axel Springer.
Not only did Magic Leap land one of the largest VC deals this year, but it also finally began shipping to consumers its flagship product, the Magic Leap One AR headset. That was a long time coming — years, in fact. So long, many doubted whether the buzzy headsets would ever see the light of day. Now, the headsets are available to buyers in 48 states, though it’s worth mentioning they cost more than two grand.
Instacart: $600M
Founder and CEO of Instacart Apoorva Mehta and moderator Megan Rose Dickey speak onstage during TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2016 at Pier 48 on September 14, 2016 in San Francisco, California. (Photo by Steve Jennings/Getty Images for TechCrunch)
Instacart has a lofty goal of delivering groceries to every household in the U.S., and it needs a lot of cash to get there. The company has raised VC every year since it completed the Y Combinator startup accelerator in 2012, and 2018 was no different. In October, the service brought in $600 million at a $7.6 billion valuation in a round led by D1 Capital Partners. Headquartered in San Francisco, the company has raised $1.6 billion to date from Coatue Management, Thrive Capital, Canaan Partners, Andreessen Horowitz and several others.
Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta told TechCrunch at the time that the startup didn’t really need the capital and that this was more of an “opportunistic” battle. The market is hot, after all, and Instacart has ambitious plans to scale and it has a fierce competitor in Amazon to take on. As for an IPO, Mehta said “it will be on the horizon.”
Katerra: $865M
SoftBank-backed Katerra says it’s brought in more than $1.3 billion in bookings for new construction ranging from residential to hospitality and student housing.
One of SoftBank’s first major bets of 2018 was on construction technology, with an $865 million investment in Katerra at a $3 billion valuation out of its Vision Fund. Katerra, a tech startup based out of Menlo Park, develops, designs and constructs buildings. At the time of its January fundraise, Katerra told TechCrunch it had brought in more than $1.3 billion in bookings for new construction ranging from residential to hospitality and student housing. Founded in 2015 by three former private equity barons, the company has raised a total of $1.1 billion to date from SoftBank, Foxconn, Greenoaks Capital and others.
In June, Katerra announced it would merge with KEF Infra, an offsite manufacturing technology specialist, and would begin operating in India and the Middle East markets.
Opendoor: $725M
Yet another SoftBank investment, San Francisco-based Opendoor is also backed by Fifth Wall Ventures, GV, Andreessen Horowitz and more.
Opendoor’s two big SoftBank-backed investments this year totaled $725 million, valuing the company at $2.5 billion. The deal gave SoftBank a minority stake in Opendoor, an online real estate marketplace, and put one of its five managing directors, Jeff Housenbold, on the company’s board of directors. The round brought Opendoor’s total funding to slightly more than $1 billion — most of which it acquired in 2018, a major year for the company. Founded in 2014, the San Francisco-based startup is also backed by Fifth Wall Ventures, GV, Andreessen Horowitz and more.
According to TechCrunch’s Connie Loizos, Housenbold had hoped to work with Opendoor co-founder and CEO Eric Wu for some time. “The minute he joined [SoftBank] he reached out to me and let me know … saying if there was an opportunity to work together, to reach out to him,” Wu said.
Lyft: $600M
Uber competitor Lyft expanded aggressively in 2018, raised hundreds of millions in additional venture capital funding, and filed confidentially to go public.
Lyft managed to stay quite busy this year. Not only did the ridesharing company raise a $600 million round at a $15.1 billion valuation, it also acquired bike-share operator Motivate and filed confidentially to go public. Founded in 2012 by Logan Green and John Zimmer, the company has long competed with Uber, and will continue to do so as the pair race to the public markets in early-2019. Lyft, much smaller than Uber and only active in the U.S. and Canada, has raised nearly $5 billion in venture backing from KKR, Mayfield, Didi Chuxing, Floodgate and others.
San Francisco-based Lyft has spent much of the last two years expanding rapidly across the U.S. market, as well as pursuing its autonomous vehicle ambitions.
Automation Anywhere: $550M
Automation Anywhere raised a monstrous $550 million Series A in 2018, with support from the SoftBank Vision Fund.
The only surprise to make this list is Automation Anywhere, a 15-year-old provider of robotic process automation. The company raised a total of $550 million in Series A funding, a large chunk of which came from the SoftBank Vision Fund, as well as NEA, General Atlantic and Goldman Sachs. The round valued Automation Anywhere at $2.6 billion. According to PitchBook, this was the first round of institutional backing for the San Jose, Calif.-based company.
In a conversation with TechCrunch, Automation Anywhere CEO Mihir Shukla said they were attracted to SoftBank because of Masayoshi So — the CEO and founder of SoftBank: “[He} has a vision and he is investing in foundational platforms that will change how we work and travel. We share that vision.”
Peloton: $500M
SAN FRANCISCO, CA – SEPTEMBER 06: Peloton Co-Founder/CEO John Foley speaks onstage during Day 2 of TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2018 at Moscone Center on September 6, 2018 in San Francisco, California. (Photo by Kimberly White/Getty Images for TechCrunch)
Peloton’s growth exploded in 2018 as it launched its $4,000 treadmill, doubled down on original fitness streaming content and raised an additional $500 million in equity funding at a $5 billion valuation. The New York-based startup, often referred to as the “Netflix of fitness,” has raised nearly $1 billion in venture capital funding in the six years since it was founded by John Foley. It’s backed by L Catterton, True Ventures, Tiger Global and others.
It’s likely Peloton will take the public markets plunge in 2019 much like Uber and Lyft. Foley earlier this year told The Wall Street Journal that though he doesn’t have any concrete plans, 2019 “makes a lot of sense” for its stock market debut.
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The ambitious real estate ‘unicorn’ Opendoor just made its first acquisition, snapping up Open Listings
Opendoor, a four year-old, San Francisco-based company, has from the outset intended to make it possible to buy and sell residential real estate with a few key strokes. It seemingly gets closer to that audacious vision by the day. The company closed on $325 million in new funding in June in a round that brought its total equity funding to $645 million to date — and its valuation to more than $2 billion. The company has also raised $1.75 billion in debt, and two sources tell us more funding from SoftBank is imminent.
Opendoor’s cofounder and CEO, Eric Wu, who previously cofounded two other companies, won’t answer questions about SoftBank when asked. But there’s no question the company is one of the most capital-intensive startups on the scene currently. Opendoor bids on homes sight unseen, agrees to buy them, then — contingent on an inspection to verify the quality of the home (“sometimes customers aren’t aware of things like foundation issues,” explains Wu) — it sells them, charging a fee of “about 6 percent,” he says. (Recent reports claim this number can reach as high as 13 percent.)
To date, the company has largely been working with people who need to sell their homes quickly because of a new job or other life event. By using Opendoor, goes the pitch, they don’t get stuck paying for two mortgages when they can’t afford it. Yet Opendoor increasingly wants to help them buy that next house, too. Toward that end, the company has just acquired Open Listings, a four-year-old, L.A.-based startup that has aimed to make it easier and cheaper for buyers to purchase homes by automating much of what an agent would do, thus reducing the fee an agent would traditionally take.
Opendoor isn’t saying what it’s paying for Open Listings, which had raised $7.6 million from investors over the years, including Y Combinator, Matrix Partners, Arena Ventures, and Initialized Capital. But all of Open Listings’ 45 employees will join the 900 employees of Opendoor, and the move gets Opendoor into a handful of new cities in which it wasn’t already operating, including San Francisco, Seattle, Austin, L.A., and Chicago.
The deal was also a very natural fit, suggests Wu. He says he met Open Listings cofounder and CEO Judd Schoenholtz in 2015, when Schoenholtz — through YC’s alumni network — approached Wu, whose last company had passed through YC’s program. Schoenholtz “reached out and wanted to share what they were trying to solve in real estate, so we met up and talked about problems we saw and our respective approaches . . . Judd was starting with the buyer side, and we were starting with the sales side, and we continued to share notes on how we were solving both.”
The acquisition is the very first for Opendoor, though one senses it’s just the beginning of similar tie-ups. In a call yesterday, Wu referred to other initiatives that Opendoors is exploring, including a kind of financing business, which Wu has been talking about for years but that sounds closer now to fruition. “We’re doing some things around mortgages that will integrated into the shopping experience,” says Wu, without wanting to elaborate further. Home improvement loans may also be on the horizon. (Wu says Opendoor “also wants to enable home buyers to personalize their experience.”)
Opendoor is also working more closely with developers, forming partnerships with “19 of the 25 largest home builders in the country over the last 18 months,” says Wu. The idea is for Opendoor’s customers to put down a deposit on a new home, with Opendoor operating quietly in the background to both help choose a closing date, as well as to sell those customers’ previous homes.
The big question, as always, is what Opendoor does in a sustained market downturn. The company is reportedly on pace to spend more than $2.5 billion on home purchases over the next year. Yet buying homes is a complicated affair. For starters, after Opendoor acquires each home, it has to ensure the home is up to code in order to resell it. Indeed, though the company is willing to buy homes built after 1960, Wu says a growing amount of its inventory was built no earlier than 1990.
Hanging on to its inventory, which Opendoor does for 90 days on average, would seem to pose an equally big risk, particularly given that the housing market is highly sensitive to interest rates and other macroeconomic factors that could prompt a market cool-off. We may even be seeing early signs of one right now.
Wu doesn’t seem concerned, focused as he is on creating a kind of virtuous cycle of home buying. Asked about housing market slowdowns, he shrugs off the question. Maybe he needs to operate that way, given the ambitious vision of Opendoor.
Says Wu when talk turns to rising mortgage rates and growing new home inventory, “We have a world-class pricing team to track data on a national and subdivision level that informs [what we do].” As for the condition of the housing market, “we aren’t commenting,” he says.
Pictured above, left to right: Eric Wu and Judd Schoenholtz.
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Scooters go mad, Opendoor wants to buy your house and Meituan’s IPO
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
This week was something of a first for the crew, twice. First, we had two guests on the show, and, also, we only made it through two and a half topics. The former is good, the latter is, well, we’ll see.
So, this week Matthew Lynley and I were joined by David Chao, co-founder and general partner at DCM, and Steve Vassallo, a general partner at Foundation Capital. Points to both for being guinea pigs.
Heading into our first topic I’m sorry to inform you that, at least in terms of Equity, scooters are the new Uber. So, we wound up talking about both this week. We started with the fact that Bird is raising new capital at an even more staggering valuation than before ($2 billion!), and that Lime is working to raise a truckload of capital itself. (Reports vary, but it’s probably a $250 million equity round at around a $750 million valuation. There may also be some debt in the mix for Lime. More when we lock that down.)
And, as Chao’s firm is an investor in the space, we had even more to chew on.
Next up we dug into the massive new Opendoor round. The firm’s new $325 million puts it into a solid position to help people sell their houses. Which markets are the best fit was something for us to unspool, along with public market comps, such as they are. But most critical, at least in my view, was the idea of risk. On that point Vassallo made a reasonable argument regarding stress testing. We’ll see.
And finally, we touched on Meituan’s impending IPO, and how it came to be.
Thanks for sticking with Equity after all this time. We’ll be back next week with another round of chatter about the latest, greatest and dumbest that tech has to offer.
Equity drops every Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Downcast and all the casts.
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Opendoor raises $325M to make buying and selling homes a near-instant process
Investors are placing another huge bet on a startup looking to reinvent a decades-old process into something that’s near instant, this time pouring $325 million into Opendoor — a company that wants to bring the complex operation of buying or selling a home down to something similarly as simple as hailing a Lyft.
The idea of Opendoor is one not so dissimilar from a consumer theory that’s blossomed into companies worth tens of billions of dollars — consumers hate complex processes and are willing to hand off those processes to technology companies if they can make it even a little simpler. Home-buying and selling can be one of the more intense ones, requiring a lot of moving pieces and coordinating multiple time tables and schedules. Opendoor’s theory is that it can create a sizable business by dropping that time and energy cost to zero and effectively create a new technology-powered business model in the process, just like Uber or Airbnb.
Opendoor says it hopes to expand to 50 markets by the end of 2020 with this additional financing. It is in 10 markets right now, and also says it now purchases more than $2.5 billion in homes on an annual run rate. The company says it has raised a $325 million financing round co-led by General Atlantic, Access Technology Ventures and Lennar Corporation. Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue Management, 10100 Fund and Invitation Homes also participated, as well as existing investors Norwest Venture Partners, Lakestar, GGV Capital, NEA and Khosla Ventures. Opendoor has in total raised $645 million in equity and $1.5 billion in debt.
“What I realized was that there’s a lot of tailwinds with people wanting to transact with their mobile device,” CEO Eric Wu said. “We see this with Uber and Lyft and Amazon. I believe the future of real estate will be on demand and that’s the centerpiece of Opendoor’s thesis, making the transaction real time and instant. I realized there were going to be tailwinds, and that real estate was in need of being transformed.”
Opendoor has also sought to expand its efforts to make viewing those homes just as seamless. The company enables potential customers to check out a home by opening it with the app seven days a week. Wu said that most potential buyers go to the house each of the seven days up to the transaction, and then seven days after the transaction happens. Given that it’s such a significant step for any home owner, it makes sense that a lot of planning and consideration would go into the process. The next step is to create a sort of trade-up system, where Opendoor works to create a streamlined way to turn around an existing home for a new home.
Still, buying (or selling) a home is one of the single-largest transactions a consumer can do — especially if they are in a major metropolitan area where houses can quickly hit the $1 million-plus range. So it’s still a hurdle to convince consumers that they should press a few buttons to make a transaction in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Wu said that the challenge there was to build enough trust with customers that they realize the process should be as seamless and powered by transparent data.
“It’s something we faced early on when we launched the service,” Wu said. “We were asking sellers to sell their home online to a tech company. A lot of the things we’ve done — such as lowering the fees and being transparent about pricing — which helped us build trust. Since it’s one of the largest financial transactions anyone makes, we had to build a world-class pricing model, be transparent about how we got to the quote, make it a low-fee service, and provide a certainty around the process.”
To try to do all this, Opendoor says it’s built a robust data set that will help best model potential prices for homes and be more transparent about that information. Wu said Opendoor currently employs around 650 people and hopes to double that by the end of next year, and the company is investing a significant amount of capital in growing out its data science team. The challenge is to understand the dynamics of the housing market — and any potential chaos — in order to best assess how to buy and sell those homes. Opendoor acquires some risk by purchasing some homes and holding them for a period of time, so ensuring that the company knows how the market performs will be one of its biggest challenges.
Opendoor is certainly not the only player in this area, as some competitors like Knock and OfferPad are starting to raise additional capital. Knock picked up $32 million in January last year with a similar bet: simplify the home-buying process and handle all of the details behind the scenes. If anything, it’s shown that there’s an appetite among the venture community (especially one where the numbers just keep getting bigger) for models that look to tap the same consumer demand of simplifying overly complex processes to just a few inputs on a smart app powered by data science.
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Online real estate service OpenDoor raises $210M Series D despite risky financing model
This afternoon, Norwest Venture Partners announced that it led a massive $210 million Series D investment round in OpenDoor. The startup is looking to expand the usage of its marketplace platform for buying and selling real estate to 10 cities with the new capital. OpenDoor is unique in that it owns its own inventory of homes. While the predictive analytics the company employs to project… Read More
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