Zumper Raises $6.5 Million From Kleiner Perkins To Fix Your Apartment Search

Real estate startup Zumper wants to be the tool that brokers and apartment managers use when they want to list their properties online. More importantly, though, it wants to be the app that apartment hunters turn to when they’re looking for a new place to live. To do that, it’s just raised $6.5 million in a Series A round led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

Zumper, which was a finalist at TechCrunch Disrupt a few years ago, provides tools that allow brokers and property managers to simplify how they manage their listings, with mobile and web apps to post and update apartments that are available for rent.

It allows them to create listings, take photos, and fill out details on the scene from their mobile phones, which reduces the amount of time they spend traveling back and forth to the office while also updating their listings.

It then provides apartment hunters with their own web and mobile interface for searching available apartments. And since it gets information directly from the folks who are looking to rent out those spaces, information is up to date and the app provides a direct connection to landlords, agents and property managers.

The company initially launched in New York City and San Francisco and expanded to Chicago last February. But with the introduction of its consumer-facing iPhone app, it opened up nationwide and now has more than 500,000 listings for apartment hunters to choose from.

Many of those listings are a result of the ease with which agents can put apartments online. The company launched its Zumper Pro product last spring, which has gotten a number of agents on board, with listings growing by 25 percent month over month since then.

In an email, Zumper CEO Anthemos Georgiades wrote that by the end of 2014, “Zumper Pro will control a significant percentage of the listings of the top rental 20 markets in the US, meaning that Zumper’s consumers will continue to see listings on Zumper first before any other platform.”

With that traction behind it, Zumper was able to lock down its Series A funding from Kleiner Perkins. Dawn Capital, NEA and the De Wilde Family Trust also participated in this round. That comes on top of $1.7 million it had raised from those investors, as well as Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock, CrunchFund*, and The Experiment Fund. KPCB Chi-Hua Chien, who also led the firm’s seed funding in Zumper, is joining its board.

With the new funding, Georgiades says the company will be expanding and adding new platforms. The company had seven employees when it closed its Series A and plans to more than double that in the next six months, hiring mostly in engineering.

It also plans to launch Android apps for landlords and agents, as well as apartment hunters, which will definitely broaden its reach and should encourage more listings and users to sign on. It also plans to expand its listing tools for agents to provide an end-to-end tool for agents, hoping to create a one-stop shop for those who are its Pro users.

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* Disclosure: TechCrunch and CrunchFund were both founded by Michael Arrington, but outside of that, there’s no real connection between him, me, and Zumper.