PropBidder, A Residential Real Estate Technology Startup, Will Use Its New Funds To Boost Customer And Team Expansion in 2022
PropBidder, a SaaS-enabled online bidding marketplace for buying and selling homes and condos, announced the closing of a $1M seed funding round with involvement from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Futureland Ventures, and Sequoia Capital, with additional participation from John Hennessy, the chairman of Google; Ray Wirta, the former chairman of CBRE and former president of The Irvine Company; Jon Oringer, the chairman of Shutterstock; and many other notable angel investors. Institutional involvement came primarily through scout investment programs, and the startup plans to raise an additional institutional led round sometime over the next year.
The new capital will help fuel PropBidder’s customer acquisition on top of its already robust customer base and allow the company to scale its team and enterprise residential brokerage partners across many new and existing US metros.
“This funding round validates our market pull in the home bidding and offer category, as well as our clear product and customer competitive advantages that we’ve established in just under two years,” said Mikael Hastrup, Co-Founder and CEO of PropBidder. “We’re thrilled to have the support of our investors and real estate agent customers as we enter our next phase of growth.”
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Since launching the platform in 2020, PropBidder has rapidly grown an arsenal of onboarded customers and active users, who include listing agents, buyer’s agents, and buyers, as well as many relationships with enterprise partners, who include some of the largest brand name brokerages in the US, including Compass, eXP Realty, Coldwell Banker, Century 21, RE/MAX, Keller Williams, Sotheby’s and many others.
Husband-and-wife founding team, Mikael Hastrup and Sydney Hastrup, have emerged as a real estate and technology power couple, who bring a combined 15+ years of experience across both fields. Mikael Hastrup, co-founder and CEO, is a licensed real estate agent and previously held real estate roles at The Irvine Company, The New Home Company, and Bank of America, as well as real estate tech roles at Matterport, Fifth Wall Ventures, and a prior startup focused on new home sales software.
Sydney Hastrup, co-founder and CTO, has pioneered in her role as both a Latina and woman founder. Sydney brings several years of experience across e-commerce, software development, and retail. She most recently came from big-box retail giant Nordstrom, and previously worked as an independent web developer with specialized skillsets in payment processing integration for e-commerce platforms.
Mikael, a Stanford MBA, and Sydney, a college dropout who left after her first year to pursue a career in tech, met back in 2019 while working together on a freelance web project for an early concept within the residential brokerage market. As the initial project developed into a viable startup business, PropBidder was born in Summer 2020. While the married couple share qualities of being both technical and scrappy, Mikael identifies as the founding team’s visionary, while Sydney gravitates towards a hacker mentality.
“Our proprietary, patent-protected product was developed to be very real estate agent friendly, on either side of the transaction process, while still focusing on our paying customers, the listing agents,” said Sydney Hastrup, Co-Founder and CTO. We’ve spent particularly close attention to the buildout of the user experience and user design for listing agents, in order to speed up and simplify their workflows, while supporting this cohort’s high variety of objectives, needs, and negotiation styles, both for themselves and their clients.”
To support its fast growth trajectory into 2022 and beyond, PropBidder will continue to hire across a variety of roles, namely those within sales, customer support, and software engineering. All roles will be considered on a fully remote, in-person, and hybrid basis.
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