Opendoor acquires Seattle startup Pro.com and Skylight, will shut both platforms down

Pro.com CEO Matt Williams. (Pro.com photo)

Opendoor, the online real estate giant that enables people to buy and sell homes directly online, has acquired Seattle-based startup Pro.com and San Francisco-based Skylight. Terms of the deals were not disclosed. Both platforms that offered digital home improvement services will be discontinued.

“The additions to the Skylight and Pro.com teams will spawn like-minded founders and teammates who care about transforming living,” Opendoor CEO Eric Wu wrote in a blog post. “As their platforms retire, the talent and technology of each team will help us scale and accelerate our roadmap.”

San Francisco-based Opendoor is a leader in the growing iBuyer market, which also includes other companies such as Seattle companies Zillow Group and Redfin. They aim to digitize the home buying experience from start to finish and take a stake in the nearly $ 2 trillion real estate industry. The pandemic has helped fuel an iBuying hype with the acceleration of digital rollouts like virtual tours, the Wall Street Journal reported last week.

Opendoor makes money on fees, similar to real estate commission, as well as the difference between what it buys and sells a home for. It also offers ancillary services such as home repairs and mortgages.

The company, which went public last year through a SPAC deal, is now active in more than 40 markets and acquired a record 8,494 apartments in the second quarter of 2021.

With the acquisition of Pro.com, Opendoor is present in Seattle for the first time; the move could help the company recruit talent from Zillow, Redfin, and Compass, who have sizable Seattle operations.

(Opendoor picture)

Pro.com was founded in 2013 and was a technology-driven general contractor platform. It aimed to streamline the home renovation process, such as: B. a pricing engine that ensures bids are correct, a mobile-friendly bidding tool, and other project management services.

The company’s original mission was to transform the way homeowners find, book, and schedule home improvement such as plumbers and painters. However, it later switched its business model from being a home improvement marketplace to being a general contractor itself with a full list of in-house construction workers.

Recently, Pro.com published “Benchmark Quote”, which analyzed several offers from general contractors.

Pro.com co-founders Matt Williams and Raji Subramanian will move to Opendoor as a result of the deal, but some employees will not move. Opendoor hires more than 50 people from Pro.com and Skylight; Pro.com currently has around 70 employees and Skylight has around 37 employees, according to LinkedIn. Skylight was launched five years ago.

Pro.com laid off 52 employees, or roughly a third of its workforce, a little over a year ago as it was cited as the pandemic’s house building impact.

The startup raised a $ 33 million round in January 2019. Total funding so far has been over $ 60 million. Investors include the WestRiver Group; Redfin; DFJ (emerging companies); Madrona Venture Group; Maveron; Two Sigma Ventures; Redpoint Ventures; and Bezos expeditions. Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman joined the company’s board of directors after Redfin invested in Pro.com in 2019.

Back then, Williams said, Redfin and Pro.com were considering partnering with Redfin Now, Redfin’s iBuyer program, to accelerate renovation projects. Now it looks like Opendoor is pursuing this strategy.

Williams previously ran Seattle-based LiveBid.com, which was acquired by Amazon in 1999. He stayed at Amazon until 2010 and later served as CEO of Digg for two years before starting Pro.com in 2013 and watching his stepfather run a construction company.

Subramanian worked at Amazon from 1999 to 2006. She worked briefly at Yahoo and started an engineering outsourcing company called Radien Software.