US-based online realty platform HomeLight, which counts financial services firm Citi and internet conglomerate Alphabet, closed a total of $109m in equity and debt financing. Part of the total ($63m) was collected in its series C round, which was led by Zeev Ventures and also featured venture firms Group 11, Menlo Ventures, Crosslink Capital, Stereo Capital as well as a group of unnamed investors. The source of the remaining $46m of debt financing was not disclosed. The series C funding will be employed to grow its matching platform, develop consumer financial and lending products, while the debt facility will be used for mortgage operations. GV, the early-stage investment unit of Alphabet, had backed the company in 2012 and 2015, while Citi Ventures had supplied funding in its $40m series B round.
Founded in 2012, HomeLight runs an online referral platform which that identifies the most suitable realtors to help users sell their homes by employing machine learning to analyse over 40 million real estate transactions. The platform features more than 1.4 million agent profiles and offers investor matching, home loans and title and escrow services.
The transaction forms part of the broader real estate tech space, which has seen much interest from corporate venture investors in recent years, as our GCV Analytics bar chart illustrates. The number of corporate-backed rounds in this space has been growing from 18 rounds in 2014 to 44 by the end of 2018 and 43 by the end of October this year, which suggests an upward trend. The same is true for the total estimated capital in these rounds, which has grown multi-fold from $650m in 2014 to $2.35bn in 2018 and even further to $2.82bn by the end of last month.