Houza.com closes a $5.5M Pre-Series A round
Dubai-based property portal houza has announced the closing of its $5.5M Pre-Series A round as it seeks to gain market share with the support of its agency partners.
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Dubai’s property portal, houza, raised $5.5M in a Pre-Series A round from UAE’s top real estate agencies. Co-founded in 2020, by CEO Barry Judge, houza.com is on a mission to challenge the fundamentals of the UAE real estate industry by driving down listing costs for agencies, and hosting only selective and carefully screened agencies.
The UAE VC ecosystem has been scouring new heights being the most funded and the most transacted geography in MENA in H1’22. Besides the top industries like FinTech, Transport & Logistics, and E-commerce, Real Estate is a space that has been emerging with technologies in multi-integrated platforms that are disrupting the traditional Real Estate dealing in the region. Over the past few months, solutions like Online Property Platform Nawy, an app for your Real Estate request Deal App, as well as property management platform Darent raised sizable investments to raise close to $10M collectively. Recently, Dubai’s Huspy closed a stellar Series A round of $37M to digitally transform the home ownership journey.
The VC ecosystem across the MEAPT region has aggregated over $5Bn in funding in H1'22, as seen in our State of Startup Funding - H1 2022 Emerging Venture Markets Report. The MENA VC ecosystem raised south of $2Bn driven by multiple Mega Deals traversing FinTech, Food & Beverage, and Agriculture industries.
houza’s ‘by the industry, for the industry’ model empowers the web portal’s in-depth understanding of the pain points of real estate transactions. The startup ranks listings in accordance to performance and value content. The portal's monetization model charges agencies per lead delivered as opposed to the industry standard of ‘cost per listing’. houza’s web platform also features an algorithm which ranks listings based on content quality versus paying your way to the top. This benefits property seekers, giving an honest indication of sought-after properties which are ranked based on quality content, number of incoming leads, agent response time, and more.
The startup also announced the appointment of its new CEO, Jean-Pierre Mondalek, as it closed its Pre-Series A round. The CEO shared his thoughts on the future of the company, “I will work closely with our seasoned team and agency partners on ensuring we delight property seekers and real estate agents alike by being focused on building high quality and exclusive-to-houza content and driving leads, respectively.”
houza is set to build out its team and continue expanding its presence in the UAE market. The startup will be doubling down on solving perennial problems related to fake and duplicate listings as well as partnering with real estate agencies to launch a range of ‘first-to-market’ properties on its website. Co-founder, Barry Judge, commented on the investment, “houza has made some fantastic progress over the past 18 months and our 2022 fundraise will allow us to really drive home our value propositions around ‘no-fake-listings’ and ‘first-to-market’ properties."
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