HousingAnywhere, a Rotterdam-based international exchange student housing platform, has raised a 5 million euro series A round to finance its international growth.
The round was led by Real Web, a company behind the Italian real estate platform Immobiliare.it. Dutch VC HenQ also participated, which already invested in HousingAnywhere in the seed stage.
HousingAnywhere, founded in 2009 by Niels van Deuren, offers students who’re planning to study abroad the possibility to find in advance a place to live in their new city. Student rooms on the platform are offered both by homeowners as well as the housing offices of one of the many universities that the startup collaborates with. Students can also find renters for the room they leave behind. HousingAnywhere.com acts as an impartial party for the first payments, making it safe and secure for both the students and the homeowners.
It’s one of those startups that were built out of frustration: Van Deuren got the idea preparing for his own foreign exchange study in Singapore – when he found out finding suitable housing in a city where he didn’t know anyone, proved to be a challenge.
Also check out our video interview with Niels van Deuren in 2015
International growth
The new funding enables the platform to expand to more countries and cities in major foreign exchange markets like the USA and Western Europe, where the EU’s popular Erasmus student exchange program alone mobilizes about 270,000 foreign exchange students each year. HousingAnywhere.com is set to reach 60 countries next year, expanding to 100 in 2018.
It took a while for the company to grow fast, but right now HousingAnywhere claims a thousand new properties are added to the platform weekly.
Image: Wikimedia Commons