Houzz, an online community for homeowners and home renovation professionals, continues to expand with new leadership and funding.
The site's founders secured $11.6 million in financing this week, which will go towards hiring additional engineers to continue to build out the site. Alfred Lin, a VC at Sequoia Capital and former top executive at Zappos, will join Houzz's board of directors, according to an article in All Things Digital.
Alfred Lin
Formerly the COO/CFO of Zappos, Lin was the number two executive at Zappos at the time of its acquisition by Amazon, and "has had a nearly flawless resume as an entrepreneur over the years," according to an article in TechCrunch (April 2010). "Every company he’s worked for has been acquired, and the smallest deal was $265 million."
Houzz's traffic has increased 10x since its last funding round of $2 million in 2010, and the site has introduced e-commerce features to drive purchases of home goods. Houzz boasts 30,000 professional profiles on the site, 50 million page views a month, 2.5 million uniques and one million downloads of its ipad/iphone app. Houzz generates revenue through a direct-advertising model, enabling it to offer free content to users.
