Real Estate Marketing & Beyond
Real estate technology startup Qualia, which streamlines the home closing process by bringing all parties to a sale onto a common platform, has raised $33 million in a Series B round of funding.
The round was led by Menlo Ventures with participation from 8VC, Bienville Capital, and Barry Sternlicht. With this new capital, Qualia will expand its engineering and product teams and accelerate their growth into additional markets across the U.S.
Qualia addresses the lack of technology in the $40B home closing industry by bringing everyone involved in the transaction – lenders, realtors, title agents, home buyers and sellers – onto one shared, secure platform to work in tandem, simplify tasks, and document progress in real time. This new degree of coordination and real-time communication opens up a new avenue to improve client experiences for the nation’s estimated sixteen thousand lenders and two million real estate agents. It also vastly increases understanding, visibility and efficiency throughout the process for everyone, particularly first-time home buyers.
“Until Qualia, the confusion and pain during the home closing process was widely considered a rite of passage to the world of home ownership,” said Nate Baker, founder and CEO of Qualia. “We streamline the home buying experience for all parties and make coordination unbelievably simple for lenders, realtors, and settlement agents. Buyers are also empowered by using our app to better understand their transaction and communicate with their closing team, so they’re kept in the loop about their home purchase every step of the way.”
Today, five per cent of the national real estate market is transacted through Qualia, a growth that came quickly after expanding its platform nationwide late last year. The company is on track to quickly increase this percentage and become the primary, leading software platform of the real estate closing process.
“Qualia is a great example of a modern system of record that dramatically improves workflows, coordinates all key constituents, and has a powerful network effect,” said Tyler Sosin, partner at Menlo Ventures. “The Qualia team has a unique perspective on one of the most acute pain points in the real estate industry, the closing process, and are poised to become the industry’s default real estate transaction platform.”
More than half of the top 100 mortgage lenders and real estate brokerages in the country have joined the thousands of settlement agents currently using Qualia to deliver a modern and differentiated home buying experience to their clients. They represent the next generation of real estate businesses as the transaction process moves online to create a shared system of record.
