The Madrid-based online accommodation platform for students and professionals Spotahome has recently announced moving its headquarters to London from Madrid. After successfully snapping up the ex-Uber chief Cleo Sham, as its new COO, the startup is now poised to enter Europe and hire a staff of 200 people in the UK.
For the uninitiated, Spotahome is an online booking platform that enables one to find accommodation in a city for more than 30 days, without needing to visit and check out the place of their stay. As for the decision of moving base to London, Spotahome founder Alejandro Artacho tells FT that it was necessary since new executives wanted to be based there.
“I was talking to top executives and it happened either they were already in London or were more willing to relocate to London [than Madrid],” says Alejandro. “It is going to be a hub and city that is attracting talent anyway.” The company executive also reveals that some of his co-founders stepped aside to make way for newly joined talent. Back in January, the company’s former COO and co-founder, Bruno Bianchi, moved to a newly-created role as director of strategy. This happened after Cleo Sham joined as the new COO of the startup.
So, how does it work?
As mentioned earlier, Spotahome enables one to find accommodation online in a city for more than 30 days. However, it’s not as simple as it sounds since the startup’s team visits every house that is listed on its website. They click photos, create floor plans and “write honest descriptions” of these places so that one can save some time and money in personally checking out the place where they want to stay. The startup raised €35.2 million last year at a valuation of €141 million.
Spotahome was founded back in 2014. Its online listing includes apartments, rooms, studios and student residences for residential renting. The company currently operates across seven countries, in ten cities, and claims of having over 60,000 listed properties that are accessed by over 3 million users per month on its website.
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