DENVER: Online interior-design startup raises $5.8 million
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- 30 Mar 2020
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DENVER — Two sisters each found themselves in new living spaces. They wanted to decorate but were floored at the cost of hiring an interior designer.
Two years ago they came up with a Denver-based online store, Havenly, where a customer could get some online interior decorating advice from professionals starting at $79 and then order the items right from the site.
The idea has caught the attention of investors.
Today, the sisters – Lee Mayer and Emily Motayed – announced $5.8 million in a series A2 round of funding, bringing their funding total to date to $13.3 million.
The raise was led by San Francisco-based Binary Capital, which added to the existing investment from Boulder-based Foundry Group and Chicago Ventures.
The money will be used to build the company’s analytics team.
“We’ve been operating lean, and we want to take this to the next level,” Motayed said.
The company has 35 employees, with interior designers across the country. Customers take a style quiz and then get matched with a designer. The customer uploads the photos of the space they want to decorate and the designers give them several renderings.
Others have tried to enter the space, Jason Mendelson, co-founder of the Foundry Group wrote in a November 2015 blog about Foundry Group’s initial investment. But somehow the companies ended up focused on selling home goods with design as the after thought or tried to crowdsourcing designers to save money. It wasn’t working. In this case, technology can be the answer to galvanize these two markets and create an interesting business, he wrote.
“We are trying to become the first place where people go when they are buying furniture and trust us when they are looking for design help,” Motayed said.
