As of September 2015, the Barcelona-based marketplace for urban room rentals known as Badi launched into the competition with the aim of easing the process of finding a roommate. It looks like their plan is working - the startup has officially closed a Series A investment of $10 million, spearheaded by Spark Capital, with hopes of improving its European presence. Spark’s general partner Alex Finkelstein is leading the charge, and joins Badi’s board in the process.
The startup’s room rental platform caters to both sides of the equation: People will a room to rent where they also live, and people looking for a room to rent (and flatmates) in a city. It’s built out a major presence in Spain and is also live in a handful of cities in Italy, saying it has circa 700,000 registered users now, and a 10M “rental requests run rate” in Spain.
“We want to be the platform with the best user experience in the real estate market,” says CEO and co-founder Carlos Pierre, discussing Badi’s plans for the new funding. “And then expansion — so basically it’s team, product and expansion all over Europe in the next 12 to 18 months.”
“We’ll use these funds to hire the best talent, expand really fast all over Europe, while we gear up our Series b funding round,” he adds.
London, Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam and Dublin are the target cities that Pierre lists for the expansion plan. He also says the aim is to grow the team from its current headcount of 36 to around 60 before the end of the year.
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