Qualia is using technology to make buying a house less painful. It has built a suite of digital products that help homebuyers, sellers, lenders, title agents and real estate agents streamline the closing process on one platform. Now the company has closed on a deal of its own.
On Wednesday, Qualia announced that it raised a $55 million Series C funding round led by Tiger Global. This brings the company's total funding to $95 million, which it's planning to use to grow.
Although Qualia is based in San Francisco, it has a significant presence in Austin. Qualia opened up an office in Austin in 2017, which is now home to the company's sales, customer success and industry relations teams, as well as some of its marketing team.
This new funding round will help Qualia expand its team in both SF and Austin. The company says it's looking to double its employee headcount over the next year.
“Austin is a dynamic city and we knew there was already a creative, smart and hardworking talent pool there. Our customers span across the country, so we also knew we would want a presence outside of just San Francisco,” Qualia co-founder and CTO Joel Gottsegen told Built In. (Full disclosure: Today we learned that Joel is the second-cousin-once-removed of the author.)
“Qualia co-founder Lucas Hansen and I are both from Texas, so it made a lot of sense for us to put down roots for Qualia in Austin,” he said.
Qualia has about 150 employees in Austin, and it's currently in the process of finding a bigger office to accommodate all the new hires in 2020.
Qualia has more than tripled its market share in the past two years, processing 15 percent of all U.S. real estate transactions — that's over one million transactions per year.
