Loft (Down Round)

01 / WHAT IT BUILT

What the company did

Loft (founded August 2018, São Paulo, by Mate Pencz and Florian Hagenbuch) is a Brazilian proptech unicorn — a 'one-stop shop' digital real estate platform using transaction data and machine learning to price apartments at the unit level, bringing liquidity and transparency to buying, selling, financing and renovating homes in Brazil and Mexico. It grew 6x in 2020, was valued at $2.9 billion after a $425M Series D plus $100M extension in 2021 (backed by D1 Capital, DST, Tiger Global, Andreessen Horowitz, Fifth Wall, QED and others), and expanded via acquisitions.

03 / EVENT HISTORY

Events in the structured record

1. 2021
   Peak valuation

   $425 million Series D led by D1 Capital (March 2021) plus a $100 million extension led by Baillie Gifford, valuing Loft at $2.9 billion — one of the largest rounds in Latin American startup history.

2. 2022
   Cuts and efficiency drive

   As the market turned, Loft cut 543 staff in two rounds (159 in April, 384 in July 2022) from 3,200 employees, citing efficiency after years of aggressive growth and acquisitions; COO Marcel Regis (ex-Bavaria/AB InBev) was brought in to prepare for an adverse market.

3. 2023
   Down round

   Loft closed an approximately $100 million funding round as part of a structured financing that began in Q3 2022 — led by an undisclosed Middle Eastern sovereign fund (Abu Dhabi's ADQ) with participation from existing investors (a16z, Altimeter, Baillie Gifford, BTG Pactual, GIC, D1, DST, Fifth Wall, QED, Valor and others). Unlike the 2021 rounds, no $2.9B-level valuation was announced; the round is catalogued in this dataset as the 2023 down round. Loft continued operating afterwards.