Uniplaces, the Portuguese startup that runs a booking platform for student accommodation, founded in 2012 and with headquarters in London, has raised a $24 million Series A funding led by Atomico.
The round includes the existing investors Octopus Ventures and Shilling Capital Partners and the co-investor Caixa Capital. Among the angel investors backing the round, there are the founders from Trivago, King.com, Klarna, Supercell and Albion. New angel investors join earlier Angel investor and founder of Zoopla, Alex Chesterman.
According to Miguel Santo Amaro, Co-founder at Uniplaces,
We’ll be investing in developing our platform and growing our product team. Obviously, we want to keep improving the experience of our users and continue to innovate to enhance our product leadership. A key part of our product strategy will be developing our mobile proposition, which we will be investing in heavily.That’s the tech part. In terms of geographic expansion we look to consolidate our market position in the key 9 european countries where we are operational (UK, France, Spain, Germany, Italy, Poland, Austria, Portugal, Netherlands). Of course we always have an eye on new market opportunities, although we favour building our business off a solid foundation in core markets. USA, Australia, China, and Brazil already represent important markets for us on the demand side and we are excited to develop our position in these markets.
For Mattias Ljungman, Partner at Atomico,
Uniplaces is solving a major pain point among students everywhere. 160 million young people in higher education are looking for a better way to manage their university housing experience. It is great to see this team from Lisbon that’s rethinking the overall student experience, starting with housing.
Uniplaces is now operating in 38 cities and has over 40,000 furnished rooms in its inventory. Students from over 140 different countries have booked their student accommodation through the website, what results in more than 500,000 nights and over $25m in bookings for landlords since launch.
SEE ALSO: Uniplaces raises $3.5M from Octopus Investments and others