HomeRoom, a Kansas City-based residential real estate proptech, announced raising $1 million in pre-seed funding and being selected to join the Y Combinator accelerator, according to the Kansas City Business Journal.
The company’s real estate product brings investors, tenants and homeowners together on a single online mobile platform, offering a large number of co-living homes and helping random roommates sign a lease together.
The $500,000 Y Combinator investment made up a large portion of HomeRoom’s pre-seed funding, with Uplift Syndicate and The HO0 Fund also the company cross the $1 million mark.
“It’s really the best financing offer I’ve ever heard of. I’m just really excited that it pushed us over the $1 million for our fundraising round, which is a big milestone,” HomeRoom CEO Johnny Wolff said about the company’s accelerator selection and plans for the funding.
“It’s exciting to have that freedom as a company to invest in marketing, in our sales team and in technology,” he said.
The platform currently has 140 co-living homes listed in more than 30 cities across seven major metro areas, with homes owned by 85 investors.
In addition to adding new employees and technology, HomeRoom also hopes to expand to more than 80 cities across 20 major metro areas this year.
“We just added Indianapolis, Pittsburgh and Tampa and are currently looking at Denver,” Wolff said. “The goal is to enable real estate investors to invest with confidence and anywhere in the United States in co-living or single family homes with HomeRoom.”
By joining the Y Combinator program, HomeRoom will get to work with strategic partners, including other proptechs and general tech companies such as Uber and Lyft.
Wolff drew parallels to these now-popular platforms, likening investors to drivers and HomeRoom tenants to passengers.
“We thought it was a really nice combination to work with them, and they’ve seen how this dynamic plays out and obviously had a lot of success. We want to be in every city in the United States just like Uber and Lyft are,” he said.
In other recent fintech news, Wilshere Lane Capital announced gaining access to Morgan Properties large home unit catalog via a strategic partnership. PadSplit also announced tripling year-over-year unit volume on its platform, following a large Series B and increasing popularity in the co-living model.