Online furniture marketplace Move Loot offers a place where buyers can find affordable pre-owned goods and where sellers can get rid of things they no longer want or need. In order to make its service available in new places and to new users, the company just raised $9 million in new funding.
Move Loot’s goal is to help reduce waste and provide true collaborative consumption through a seamless sharing of goods. According to co-founder and CEO Bill Bobbitt, that ultimately changes the way people view the things they buy and sell.
But unlike some other marketplaces out there, Move Loot offers a full-service offering for both buyers and sellers, which includes the pickup, listing, storage, and delivery. To do so, it has to build out the warehousing and logistics infrastructure necessary to serve the markets it operates in.
Bobbitt noted that while other companies use third-party services like FedEx or UPS to ship things, furniture is too big and bulky to do so. By contrast, Move Loot has created a fully integrated marketplace to handle last-mile delivery and really control the user experience. Workers who do furniture pickup and delivery are salaried employees with benefits, not 1099 contractors.
“We want to have best-in-class movers and best-in-class delivery people,” Bobbitt said. “They are our touch point with the customer.”
It’s also built out a logistics platform that enables it to efficiently handle those pickups and deliveries. While most pickups can happen within a day, Bobbitt said pickups are scheduled five days ahead of time on average. Deliveries are generally scheduled for two days in advance. In either case, based on its logistics platform, Move Loot can provide a very small window for moving furniture in or out of a customer’s home.
Currently the service is active in just a few markets, including the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as Charlotte and the Research Triangle region of North Carolina. But in the coming months, Move Loot plans to move into three new cities and make its marketplace of used furniture goods available elsewhere.
To support its expansion, Move Loot raised a $9 million round of funding led by Metamorphic Ventures with participation from First Round Capital, Index Ventures, Great Oaks, IDG, Sherpa Ventures, Google Ventures and Y Combinator. Along with the funding, Metamorphic General Partner David Hirsch is joining the company’s board of directors.