A New First: Our First Capital Raise
Exactly two years ago this week, Steve and I helped our first home buyer close on their home purchase. It was an experience that ultimately changed the path of our company and our lives. It was that key transaction that kickstarted the journey that led us to ultimately meeting many of you.
When we completed that transaction, we still had almost one year left in the MBA program at Kellogg. Bootstrapping our way to become FlyHomes, we’d hop on the cheapest flights… including those that took us to Portland with a drive up to Seattle…, sleep on couches, and skip classes, when a potential new client came into the pipeline. It was an exciting challenge to try to start something from nothing. But those trips were worth it, as we kept winning houses, and our clients kept telling their friends about us. It’s through those referrals that enabled us to meet Yikun at Northwestern and hire our first full-time hire in Seattle. From then on, we hired Vinny, and then Chinmay, Zach, Prabhjot, and…you get it!
Two years later, we’ve now helped over 300 people purchase more than $150MM of homes and we’ve been able to grow our team to ~30 incredible entrepreneurs who are on a mission to help buyers win.
Today, we get to announce an exciting new step in our journey!
We’ve raised $4M of outside capital, including a $2M Series A investment led by Mark Vadon, one of the leaders in the e-commerce space.
We are thrilled to have Mark join our board and have him provide FlyHomes with strategic guidance that will enable us to further execute to deliver on our company’s mission. Mark is a veteran in the startup world who has a track-record of growing companies and mentoring a select few entrepreneurs to build industry changing companies, such as Blue Nile, Chewy, and Zulily. Steve and I, and the rest of the team are excited to learn from Mark’s experiences in challenging the status quo and pushing companies to uncharted territories.
We will be leveraging this new capital to invest heavily in marketing our brand, growing our operations, and investing in our product (I hope you like the new branding!). In addition, a significant portion of the capital we raised will be invested directly into a fintech solution that will help buyers win in seller’s markets. More to come soon on that. 😊
It’s been an exciting journey to date, and we are just getting started!
Best,
Tushar
