Real estate & property tech

Flyhomes Raises $150M To Streamline Homebuying

End-to-end homebuying startup Flyhomes has raised $150 million in a Series C round of funding, the company announced Thursday.

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Flyhomes helps clients through the entire homebuying process. It offers products including home lending and the option for buyers to make cash offers by helping them get pre-approval for underwriting for a short-term loan.

The company was founded in 2016 after co-founders Tushar Garg and Stephen Lane met in business school and worked on a project to combine their backgrounds in machine learning, real estate and finance. 

The pair obtained their real estate licenses to learn about customer behavior and began helping friends buy homes, when they realized how disjointed the homebuying process could be. So, they built Flyhomes to make the process more transparent and efficient.

“When you come to buy with Flyhomes it’s a fully streamlined, standardized process,” Garg said in an interview with Crunchbase News.

Norwest Venture Partners and Battery Ventures co-led the round, which included participation from Fifth Wall, Camber Creek, Andreessen Horowitz, Canvas Ventures, Balyasny Asset Management and Zillow co-founder Spencer Rascoff. Norwest’s Lisa Wu and Battery’s Roger Lee will join the company’s board of directors.

Flyhomes most recently raised funding with a $21 million Series B led by Canvas Ventures in August 2019. 

Investor Wu’s strategy is to look for businesses in opaque industries where disruptors can come in and provide a better, more transparent experience. Real estate fits in with that strategy, as it’s a large market, and homebuying is a process that is often difficult to navigate, Wu said in an interview with Crunchbase News. 

“In real estate there aren’t that many brands that come to mind yet and homebuying is one of those massive categories,” she said.

The funding comes after a major year for the U.S. residential real estate market. While existing home sales were down 2.7 percent month-over-month from April, home sales were still up 20 percent from January through April compared to the same period last year, according to the National Association of Realtors

Riding that wave, venture-backed companies in the real estate space have raised nearly $4.4 billion in funding so far this year, per Crunchbase data.

Flyhomes plans to use the new funding to double down on its current markets and double its footprint nationally, Garg said. The company operates in Seattle, Portland, the Bay Area, Southern California, and Boston, according to its website.

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias

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