Trulia.com, a residential real estate search engine, has secured a $10 million Series C round of funding led by Sequoia Capital, which also includes previous venture investors Accel Partners and Fayez Sarofim & Co. This $10 million investment will fund Trulia’s general operations and enable the company to expand its team of real estate and search technology experts, deepen marketing and sales efforts and develop new products and services aimed at helping consumers make smarter decisions about buying and selling homes.
Launched in September 2005 by Pete Flint and Sami Inkinen, Trulia helps consumers find homes for sale that meet their specific criteria and make smarter real estate decisions. Trulia’s interactive tools are available in all 50 US states and include National Heat Maps, Real Estate Guides, user generated real estate questions and answers in Trulia Voices and data on comparable and recently sold properties. Trulia has raised a total of $17.7m to date.
Advertising spend in the real estate industry will be $11 billion in 2007 according to Borrell Associates, a media research firm that tracks local advertising spend. With over 80% of consumers using the Internet as part of their home buying research and advertising spend rapidly transitioning from offline media to online media, Trulia is positioned to capitalize on a huge opportunity in the rapidly evolving online real estate industry.
Trulia, Inc. (www.trulia.com), a residential real estate search engine, has revolutionized online home search by offering a rich, intuitive user experience that points consumers directly to listings on agent and broker Web sites. By partnering with the real estate industry, Trulia helps consumers find information on homes for sale using custom search criteria such as price and number of bedrooms to market trends and neighborhood data at the hyper-local level. Founded in San Francisco in 2005 by Pete Flint and Sami Inkinen, Trulia is live across the U.S. For more information, go to www.trulia.com
Sequoia Capital provides startup venture capital for very smart people who want to turn ideas into companies. As the “Entrepreneurs Behind the Entrepreneurs,” Sequoia Capital’s Partners have worked with innovators such as Steve Jobs of Apple Computer, Larry Ellison of Oracle, Bob Swanson of Linear Technology, Sandy Lerner and Len Bozack of Cisco Systems, Dan Warmenhoven of Network Appliance, Jerry Yang and David Filo of Yahoo!, Jen-Hsun Huang of nVIDIA, Michael Marks of Flextronics, Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen of YouTube, Steve Goldman and Sujal Patel of Isilon Systems and Dominic Orr and Keerti Melkote of Aruba Wireless Networks. To learn more about Sequoia Capital visit www.sequoiacap.com.
Founded in 1983, Accel Partners has a history of excellence and innovation in the venture capital business. The firm is dedicated to partnering with outstanding management teams to build world-class Internet, software and networking companies. With over $3 billion under management, Accel Partners has a long legacy of helping entrepreneurs build highly successful companies. Accel portfolio companies have completed IPOs that have created well over $100 billion in market capitalization. Accel has a history of backing category-defining companies, which include BitTorrent, Facebook, Glam Media, Macromedia, MetroPCS, Polycom/PictureTel, UUNet, Veritas, RealNetworks and Riverbed. For more information, visit www.accel.com.