Home Deco Site Houzz Raises $150M At A $2.3B Post-Money Valuation

Looks like home-remodelling and design site Houzz is upsizing. Filings that the startup made at the end of May in Delaware, uncovered by the folks at VCExperts, indicate that it is raising a Series D round of $150 million, at a post-money valuation of just over $2.3 billion on a fully-diluted basis.

What’s striking is that the documents show that in its last round, in January 2013 when it raised $35 million, Houzz was valued at up to $325 million — rising over seven times in the last 17 months.

That’s valuation growth not unlike the rapid rise we’ve seen in the real estate market in some cities.

The full document is embedded below. The basic details indicate that this fourth round has 2,002,039 shares issued with the price per share at $74.9236, working out to just under $150 million for the Series D. As a point of comparison, the price per share in the Series C was $13.3438. The fully-diluted number of shares is 31,000,000.

It appears that the deal is closed already, according to Justin Byers, the director of business intelligence at VCExperts. “Once these are filed, the deal should be done,” he says. “These filings are changing/updating their structure as to what they authorize to issue for shares.” There could, however, still be more to come in the round.

What the documents do not tell us is who is behind the investment, nor how it will be used. We’ve reached out to Houzz for details on that front, but a spokesperson says Houzz has nothing to share at this time.

On the investment side,  Byers points out that in the document neither the Series C or Series D investors are specified as getting a board of director spot. “This could be a good indication of an inside round.” He suggests Sequoia as an option, given that it was an investor in a previous round and it has something of a track record on inside rounds. (But, again, we don’t know this for certain.)

Other investors in the Series C were  New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and GGV Capital, who led the round, as well as Comcast Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Yammer founder David Sacks — who says he first came across the site as a user, not an investor. Previous rounds also included Sequoia, as well as Gary Ginsberg, Amos Wilnai, Don Katz, Oren Zeev, Jeff Fluhr, Oren Dobronsky and Mike Chalfen.

As for where the money may go, there are a couple of areas that could be tapped. For starters, Houzz, founded in 2009 by Alon Cohen and Adi Tatarko, currently has a couple of revenue streams: sales of items in its home decor storefront, and premium accounts for decorating and design professionals. So there may be more investment in building that out with more features and attracting more users with marketing and so on.

And there is investment in global growth. Earlier this year, the site — which says some 35% of its users come from outside of the U.S. — took its first official international steps with offices in the UK, Germany and Austria and plans also for Asia Pacific expansion. That effort is being led by Oliver Jung, who once had a similar role at Airbnb.

In January, Houzz reported 16 million monthly users — a number that is probably on the rise, given the investment numbers we’re seeing today.