Zumper raises a $17.6M Series B to expand beyond apartment searches

Zumper, the online apartment search platform, has raised $17.6M in Series B funding. This brings total funding to date to $39.2M. While the company declined to discuss valuation, TechCrunch has learned that it’s just north of $100M post-money.

The round was led by Jim Breyer’s firm Breyer Capital and Foxhaven Asset Management, and included follow-up funding from existing investors Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, Scott cook and others.

Zumper’s core product is a free online and mobile rental search platform that is used millions of times a month to find rental apartments in the U.S and Canada.

The company also offers a paid service, Zumper Pro, which lets landlords and brokers manage listings and screen potential tenants. This paid offering, as well as revenue from other sources like a feature that charges landlord to promote their listings, has allowed Zumper to approach nearly $5M in yearly revenue run rate.

While some of the funding will go to scaling and improving Zumper’s core search product, the startup also plans to use the money to launch a brand new product offering – designed to help renters even after they are done with the search process.

While the company declined to give specific details, CEO Anthemos Georgiades explained that currently Zumper loses control of the process once renters move past the search stage and start interacting with brokers and landlords.

Essentially even if Zumper can provide a great search experience customers may still end up disappointed if they get stuck with a bad broker. So the new product is designed to shepherd renters through the entire rental process from start to finish.

A product like this could be much more lucrative than apartment searches, since Zumper may be able to put itself in a position to collect broker commissions – which can be as much as 12-15% of a tenant’s yearly rent.

Georgiades explained that providing product like this was always the company’s goal – but instead of having to grow it from scratch, when the company first launched it made the strategic decision to start in the search market so it would automatically have a loyal customer base when it introduced more products down the road.

Zumper has been quietly testing this new service over the last 9 months, and will launch it in early 2017.