Fintech

Housing startup QuintoAndar to open first technology hub outside Brazil in Portugal

Comment

QuintoAndar
Image Credits: QuintoAndar / QuintoAndar co-founders André Penha and Gabriel Braga

QuintoAndar is taking its first steps out of Brazil to open a technology hub in Lisbon, Portugal aimed at attracting technology talent across the pond.

Co-founder and CEO Gabriel Braga made the announcement at Web Summit 2021 going on this week in Lisbon. The new office will serve as its first in Europe and will be operational in March, initially staffing up to 50 by the end of next year.

The company touts itself as “the largest housing platform in Latin America,” providing selling and rental assistance, and also takes on the risk associated with monthly rental payments. QuintoAndar currently had more than 150,000 properties and $50 billion in assets under management and operates in more than 40 cities across Brazil.

The move comes six months after the company raised $300 million in Series E funding that valued the company at $4 billion. In August, investors Tencent and Greenoaks added another $120 million to push valuation to $5.1 billion and over $700 million raised in total, Braga said.

He noted that the European region is home to a lot of technology talent, and the tech hub was something that had been in the works for awhile, but was postponed due to the global pandemic. Now that the company has embraced a hybrid work model, it is ready to take the step to expand internationally.

In addition to the presence in Portugal, QuintoAndar is also preparing to make a similar move to Mexico next year, Brag said.

“The new office is part of our long-term focus of building a world-class tech team and part of the funding will support that continuous investment,” he added. “We are based in Brazil, but more and more, we are bringing on people from all over the world to join us. Remote work made it easier in some ways and hard in others, but now we have more people spread out.”

Brazilian proptech startup QuintoAndar lands $300M at a $4B valuation

 

More TechCrunch

Booking.com has been designated a gatekeeper under the bloc’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), meaning the online travel agency will face regulation under the bloc’s market fairness and contestability framework —…

Booking latest to fall under EU market power rules

Featured Article

‘Got that boomer!’: How cyber-criminals steal one-time passcodes for SIM swap attacks and raiding bank accounts

Estate is an invite-only website that has helped hundreds of attackers make thousands of phone calls aimed at stealing account passcodes, according to its leaked database.

52 mins ago
‘Got that boomer!’: How cyber-criminals steal one-time passcodes for SIM swap attacks and raiding bank accounts

Website builder Squarespace is going private in an all-cash deal that values the company on an equity basis at $6.6 billion, or a $6.9 billion enterprise valuation. The acquiring company…

Permira is taking Squarespace private in $6.9 billion deal

AI-powered tools like OpenAI’s Whisper have enabled many apps to make transcription an integral part of their feature set for personal note-taking, and the space has quickly flourished as a…

Buymeacoffee’s founder has built an AI-powered voice note app

Airtel, India’s second-largest telco, is partnering with Google Cloud to develop and deliver cloud and GenAI solutions to Indian businesses.

Google partners with Airtel to offer cloud and genAI products to Indian businesses

To give AI-focused women academics and others their well-deserved — and overdue — time in the spotlight, TechCrunch has been publishing a series of interviews focused on remarkable women who’ve contributed to…

Women in AI: Rep. Dar’shun Kendrick wants to pass more AI legislation

We took the pulse of emerging fund managers about what it’s been like for them during these post-ZERP, venture-capital-winter years.

A reckoning is coming for emerging venture funds, and that, VCs say, is a good thing

It’s been a busy weekend for union organizing efforts at U.S. Apple stores, with the union at one store voting to authorize a strike, while workers at another store voted…

Workers at a Maryland Apple store authorize strike

Alora Baby is not just aiming to manufacture baby cribs in an environmentally friendly way but is attempting to overhaul the whole lifecycle of a product

Alora Baby aims to push baby gear away from the ‘landfill economy’

Bumble founder and executive chair Whitney Wolfe Herd raised eyebrows this week with her comments about how AI might change the dating experience. During an onstage interview, Bloomberg’s Emily Chang…

Go on, let bots date other bots

Welcome to Week in Review: TechCrunch’s newsletter recapping the week’s biggest news. This week Apple unveiled new iPad models at its Let Loose event, including a new 13-inch display for…

Why Apple’s ‘Crush’ ad is so misguided

The U.K. Safety Institute, the U.K.’s recently established AI safety body, has released a toolset designed to “strengthen AI safety” by making it easier for industry, research organizations and academia…

U.K. agency releases tools to test AI model safety

AI startup Runway’s second annual AI Film Festival showcased movies that incorporated AI tech in some fashion, from backgrounds to animations.

At the AI Film Festival, humanity triumphed over tech

Rachel Coldicutt is the founder of Careful Industries, which researches the social impact technology has on society.

Women in AI: Rachel Coldicutt researches how technology impacts society

SAP Chief Sustainability Officer Sophia Mendelsohn wants to incentivize companies to be green because it’s profitable, not just because it’s right.

SAP’s chief sustainability officer isn’t interested in getting your company to do the right thing

Here’s what one insider said happened in the days leading up to the layoffs.

Tesla’s profitable Supercharger network is in limbo after Musk axed the entire team

StrictlyVC events deliver exclusive insider content from the Silicon Valley & Global VC scene while creating meaningful connections over cocktails and canapés with leading investors, entrepreneurs and executives. And TechCrunch…

Meesho, a leading e-commerce startup in India, has secured $275 million in a new funding round.

Meesho, an Indian social commerce platform with 150M transacting users, raises $275M

Some Indian government websites have allowed scammers to plant advertisements capable of redirecting visitors to online betting platforms. TechCrunch discovered around four dozen “gov.in” website links associated with Indian states,…

Scammers found planting online betting ads on Indian government websites

Around 550 employees across autonomous vehicle company Motional have been laid off, according to information taken from WARN notice filings and sources at the company.  Earlier this week, TechCrunch reported…

Motional cut about 550 employees, around 40%, in recent restructuring, sources say

The company is describing the event as “a chance to demo some ChatGPT and GPT-4 updates.”

OpenAI’s ChatGPT announcement: What we know so far

The deck included some redacted numbers, but there was still enough data to get a good picture.

Pitch Deck Teardown: Cloudsmith’s $15M Series A deck

Unlike ChatGPT, Claude did not become a new App Store hit.

Anthropic’s Claude sees tepid reception on iOS compared with ChatGPT’s debut

Welcome to Startups Weekly — Haje‘s weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. Look,…

Startups Weekly: Trouble in EV land and Peloton is circling the drain

Scarcely five months after its founding, hard tech startup Layup Parts has landed a $9 million round of financing led by Founders Fund to transform composites manufacturing. Lux Capital and Haystack…

Founders Fund leads financing of composites startup Layup Parts

AI startup Anthropic is changing its policies to allow minors to use its generative AI systems — in certain circumstances, at least.  Announced in a post on the company’s official…

Anthropic now lets kids use its AI tech — within limits

Zeekr’s market hype is noteworthy and may indicate that investors see value in the high-quality, low-price offerings of Chinese automakers.

The buzziest EV IPO of the year is a Chinese automaker

Venture capital has been hit hard by souring macroeconomic conditions over the past few years and it’s not yet clear how the market downturn affected VC fund performance. But recent…

VC fund performance is down sharply — but it may have already hit its lowest point

The person who claims to have 49 million Dell customer records told TechCrunch that he brute-forced an online company portal and scraped customer data, including physical addresses, directly from Dell’s…

Threat actor says he scraped 49M Dell customer addresses before the company found out

The social network has announced an updated version of its app that lets you offer feedback about its algorithmic feed so you can better customize it.

Bluesky now lets you personalize main Discover feed using new controls