San Francisco-based real estate technology company Side announced Monday that it raised $150 million in a Series D round led by Coatue Management. Just four years after it was founded, the company has solidified its status as a unicorn. Side’s valuation now stands at $1 billion.
The company works with individual real estate agents to turn their boutique brands into large-scale businesses. When agents partner with Side, they gain full ownership of their brand without having to operate a brokerage, according to the company.
Instead, Side operates its brokerage platform on the backend while providing a technology stack to help its partner agents grow. In other words, the company creates and implements business plans on behalf of its agents.
“Today’s top-producing real estate professionals are underserved and underappreciated by the existing brokerage models,” Guy Gal, co-founder and CEO of Side, said in a statement. “The incentives between brokerages and top agents and teams are misaligned.”
The company will use the fresh financing to accelerate its national expansion efforts. The brokerage platform currently has dozens of open remote and in-person tech positions up for grabs. Side is on the lookout for new employees to join its engineering, accounting, product and people teams, to name a few.
“Existing brokerages are designed to support average agents, so they put all of the heavy lifting, cost, time, and risk of operations and growth on top-producing agents who want to focus their time on expertly serving their clients,” Gal continued.
Side currently operates in California, Texas and Florida. The brokerage platform has raised over $200 million in venture capital financing to date, according to the company.
Additional investors Matrix Partners, Trinity Ventures and Sapphire Ventures participated in the round, among others.
