Just days after publicly traded real estate technology companies Redfin and Compass laid off more than 900 employees combined, another supporting technology, HomeLight, announces it has raised $60 million in equity and $55 million in financing. of debt. HomeLight’s latest $60 million capital increase is a $100 million Series D extension of the company that was announced last September. At the time, HomeLight was valued at $1.6 billion. With the extension, the Scottsdale, Arizona-based company has raised a total of $645 million since its inception in 2012 and is valued at $1.7 billion. Notably, existing investor Oren Zeev put up the entire $60 million. “This fundraising and acquisition allows us to play both offense and defense, expanding our business while also positioning the company to weather uncertainty this year and next,” Drew Uher, founder and director, told TechCrunch. HomeLight executive. The company also announced today that it will acquire Accept.inc, a Denver-based lending startup, in an all-stock transaction for an undisclosed amount. The deal is expected to close in the coming weeks. Accept describes itself as an iLender, or a “technology-enabled lender” that gives people a way to put in cash offers on a home by qualifying for a mortgage. In June 2021, TechCrunch covered the news that Accept had raised $78 million in debt and $12 million in equity. SignalFire led the equity portion of its financing, which also included participation from existing seed investors Y Combinator and DN Capital. “With our latest acquisition, HomeLight becomes the nation’s largest agent-focused energy buyer,” the company said in a statement. “Adding Accept.inc to the HomeLight family is a strategic move that will allow more HomeLight principal agents and their customers to benefit from the power, speed and certainty of transactions without contingencies.” Over the years, like many other real estate technology platforms, HomeLight has evolved its model. HomeLight’s initial product focused on using artificial intelligence to connect consumers and real estate investors with agents. Since then, the company has expanded to also provide title and escrow services to agents and home sellers and link sellers with iBuyers. In July 2019, HomeLight acquired Eave as an entry into the (increasingly crowded) home lending space. In January 2020, HomeLight launched its flagship financial products, HomeLight Trade-In and HomeLight Cash Offer. Through April, HomeLight Cash Offer, which operates in California, Colorado, Arizona, Florida and Texas, had seen 500% year-over-year growth in transaction volume, Uher said. And in the first quarter of 2022, HomeLight and Accept.inc accounted for more than $3 billion in combined referred transaction volume. “Our original goal was just to remove as much friction as possible for both agents and their customers, but as the market became more volatile in the last couple of years,” Uher told TechCrunch, “it became one of the tools most crucial.” agents would use to compete and win in their local markets. Uher believes HomeLight’s latest surge is an example of a new world “where flat valuations are the new thing.” “It’s a testament to the strength of our business,” he said. Acknowledging the struggles other players in the space are currently facing amid rising mortgage interest rates and a general housing market slowdown, Uher added that HomeLight is “watching it burn closely.” “We have reduced hiring until the end of the year,” he told TechCrunch. “…We continue to prioritize strengthening our operations, profitability and track to prepare HomeLight for the best possible future.” As for the decision to acquire Accept, Uher said it was based in part on the fact that more companies have popped up in the proptech space recently with the goal of helping home buyers and sellers with various aspects of the buying and selling process. sale and that HomeLight wanted to be even more competitive. “Our goal over the past year has been to hyper-focus on strengthening our flagship financial products to enable our agents to continue to compete and win,” he told TechCrunch. “We recognize how cash has remained king for buyers and sellers in today’s market, and we saw an opportunity to partner with one of the key players dominating the cash offering market.”
