Homee Raises $5 Million to Take the Pain out of Home Furnishing
West Hollywood-based furniture and home design app company Homee announced this week that it has secured $5 million in Series A financing led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. Homee’s iOS app also publicly launched after more than six months of beta testing and optimizing user experience.
Homee aims to help millennials who find it arduous and time-consuming to furnish their living spaces. Instead of scouring through furniture stores like IKEA or spending hours shopping online, users can enjoy free design consultations and chat with Homee’s professional interior designers, who offer personalized recommendations and visual representations of home styling results. “The furniture and interior design industries are extremely fragmented and have failed to address new shopping patterns of today’s on-the-go consumers,” Beatrice Fischel-Bock, co-founder & CEO of Homee, said in the announcement. “Homee is ushering in a new way to shop for furniture using conversational commerce and an on-demand design service.”
Homee is a successful pivot from Zoom Interiors, a web-based home design service startup founded by the very same group of people that started Homee — CEO Beatrice Fischel-Bock, CMO Madeline Fraser, CCO Lizzie Grover, CTO Ben Broca, and CDO Ethan Gromet.
Homee Team | Credit: Homee Twitter
Zoom appeared on Shark Tank in May 2015, but failed to receive any investment. The company did receive funding from Tinder founder and CEO Sean Rad, who became Homee’s founding angel investor and was subsequently instrumental in the company’s Series A fundraising.
The company had previously raised an undisclosed amount of seed money from some of Silicon Valley’s most prominent angel investors, including Pinterest CEO Ben Silverman, Founders Fund venture partner Stephen Oskoui, West Coast Holdings founding partner Bill Lee, Humin CEO and co-founder David Wyler, and celebrity entrepreneurs and socialites Scooter and Yael Braun.
Homee’s mission is similar to that of Diana Labs, another startup that offers personal shopping for home furnishing — a space that is attracting widespread attention at the moment from the venture community.
