Startup Zeus Living is the latest casualty in the proptech world.
The Airbnb-backed startup is reportedly “winding down operations,” as reported by The Information. TechCrunch has reached out to the company for comment but not heard back at the time of writing.
Zeus Living has raised $150 million in debt and equity (about $125 million of that was equity) and its backers, besides Airbnb, include Initialized Capital, CEAS Investments, TI Platform, NFX, Opendoor’s Eric Wu and Y Combinator.
Founded in 2015, Zeus Living started its life by redecorating landlords’ homes and renting the furnished properties primarily to relocated workers for 30-day stays (or longer) for a new type of corporate housing. It then broadened its focus and evolved into a company that gave people — not just corporate employees — more options to generally move around with less commitment. The company listed homes on its site, emphasizing that it was not a marketplace and rather directly managed the homes it offered — from curation to design to property management and service.
When Zeus raised $55 million in October of 2021, CEO and co-founder Kulveer Taggar told TechCrunch that the capital would go toward “getting more homes.” The company was at the time still benefiting from the remote work revolution fueled by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
But interest rates since then have climbed to their highest levels in two decades, making it harder and more expensive to purchase homes and cutting into revenue that companies like Zeus could make on their investments. According to The Information, the company wrote in an email to landlords Monday that it was “struggling financially” and would “no longer be able to make payments on homes.”
Airbnb invested in the company’s $55 million Series B round in 2019, when the company had grown to a $100 million revenue run rate and was valued at $205 million.
By contrast, another startup in the flexible living space that continues to grow is Anyplace, which recently raised $8.27 million in Series B funding.
Real estate tech companies continue to get hammered by high mortgage rates