A London-based vacation rental company has raised £14m from some of Europe’s leading early-stage investors.
The Plum Guide will use the funds to support its ambitious rollout to 12 new cities this year.
Known as the ‘Michelin Guide for Homes’, The Plum Guide selects only the top 1 per cent of properties in any city to feature on its site.
The latest funding round is led by Talis Capital, with participation from Latitude and Hearst Ventures, as well as Octopus Ventures – who led the Series A funding round.
Since launching in London in 2015, The Plum Guide has achieved year-on-year growth of three times revenues, for three years’ running.
“We are on a mission to build a marketplace of the world’s most beautiful holiday homes. This isn’t some vague qualitative ambition. We mean it. We are taking a systematic and obsessive approach to vetting every single home on the planet and accepting only the top 1%,” Doron Meyassed, Founder and CEO of The Plum Guide, said.
The company uses a proprietary algorithm to find the highest rated and best located homes in a city. Expert hospitality critics from The Plum Guide then visit each home to interview the host and meticulously test the property.
“The consumer market has entered into an age of curation where data, ratings and reviews need to be carved into useful information to support buying decisions,” said Matus Maar, Managing Partner and Co Founder at Talis Capital.
“We see huge value in businesses and teams that create a competitive advantage by being strategically data driven.”