Loft's iBuying bet: $800M raised, $2.9B unicorn, then a B2B pivot to breakeven

A São Paulo proptech digitizing home buying and selling — marketplace listings, mortgage origination and no-guarantor rentals — that originally bought, renovated and resold homes as an iBuyer.

Brazilian real estate would move online end-to-end, and Loft could win by buying, renovating and reselling homes itself (iBuying) before the 2022 rate shock.

~$800M in equity through April 2021 (Series D extension at $2.9B) plus $100M+ in debt via listed Brazilian real-estate funds.

Mate Pencz, Florian Hagenbuch and Kristian Huber — ex-Goldman Sachs colleagues who had already sold a print startup to Vistaprint — founded Loft in São Paulo in 2018, betting Brazilian real estate would follow e-commerce online the way Zillow and Opendoor had digitized the US.

A $425M Series D at $2.2B in March 2021 was extended a month later with $100M at $2.9B, bringing total equity to ~$800M. In 2021 Loft bought mortgage brokerage CrediHome, no-guarantor rental CredPago, condominium portal 123i and Mexico's TrueHome. As rates rose, it cut 855 staff in 2022; Bloomberg Línea reported an a16z-led round at ~$1B, which Loft denied.

Loft pivoted from iBuying to a B2B transactional platform and fintech tools for brokerages, cut 340 more jobs in March 2023, then claimed operational breakeven for 2023 with ~30% revenue growth and 300% more transactions.

Brazilian real estate was opaque and offline, so a platform that digitized listings and transactions had a real wedge, and its data advantage compounded over time.

iBuying created an illusion of scale: revenue grew fast but depended on cheap capital to hold inventory, which made the model fragile when rates rose.

Pivoting to B2B software kept the original data and network assets while removing the capital-heavy inventory business — the same market insight with a safer revenue model.

Denying the reported down round while privately restructuring shows how valuation optics and survival can diverge in a downturn.

A bet that depends on cheap capital looks brilliant in a bull market; when rates rise it must be restructured fast, and the capital-light version of the same idea is often the one that survives.

As of 2023-12-13, Loft expected to close 2023 at operational breakeven with ~30% year-on-year revenue growth and 300% growth in transactions, crediting a shift to B2B services for brokerages. It had moved from buying and renovating homes to a transactional platform with fintech products and an AI price calculator, similar to China's Beike. The restructuring was brutal: 855 layoffs in 2022 and 340 more in March 2023 as it exited iBuying. The $2.9B valuation of April 2021 had been built on capital that 2022's rate shock made unavailable; the business that survived was the capital-light one.