OEN Member NewsVacasa lands $103.5M from investors, will vastly expand its national reach (Portland Business Journal)
Portland-based Vacasa LLC has secured $103.5 million from investors — an almost unheard-of amount for a single round in a Rose City tech company.
The money will help aggressively expand Vacasa’s vacation property management product into new markets. The company, which has 6,000 properties on its platform, already serves 17 states and countries on four continents.
Co-founder and CEO Eric Breon said the company could do so by acquiring an existing management company.
“Where there is a good company for sale in a market, we like to enter through acquisition,” he said. “The sellers get to retire or become part of the team, homeowners get more rental money and employees get a career path and often better wages.”
Tuesday’s announcement follows a $40 million round last year that marked the company’s first outside capital. California-based private equity firm Riverwood Capital led the round, which also included Pennsylvania-based NewSpring Capital. Existing investors Level Equity and Assurant Growth Investing also participated.
Breon said Vacasa also hopes to launch new market strategies in places like Hawaii, North Carolina, New York, New Hampshire and Virginia.
The company allows vacation homeowners to book, market and maintain properties. It maintains and cleans the properties between visits while its software, which helps vacationers find lodging, enables homeowners to maximize their pricing.
The company has become ubiquitous on the Oregon coast, creating a footprint that Breon believes can translate across geographies.
Vacasa employs 1,600 workers, with 300 in its Portland headquarters.
Lead investor Riverwood Capital’s past investments include camera maker GoPro Inc., ticketing company Ticketfly Inc., and headphones maker Sol Republic Inc. Riverwood founding partner Jeff Parks is joining Vacasa’s board.
“Travelers globally have continued to show increasing demand for vacation rentals,” Parks said in a written statement. “Vacasa delivers a solution that drives significant value to both homeowners seeking to rent, and guests seeking to stay in a vacation rental.”
The vast majority of $100 million-plus rounds in the Pacific Northwest have, since 2007, gone toward Seattle-area companies, according to Seattle research firm PitchBook. The latest came last summer when Columbia Pulp, a southeast Washington cleantech company, raised $137.5 million.
Vacasa first landed on investor radar screens in 2014 when it came out of nowhere to top the list of fastest-growing private companies in Oregon and Southwest Washington. That same year it landed at No. 9 on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing companies nationwide.
While it has since stopped participating in such listings — and thus no longer releases revenue data — two years ago, it gave indications that it had surpassed its $100 million revenue goal.
Source: www.bizjournals.com
