If you walked into a Dubai bank to apply for a mortgage in 2020, chances are you’d spend months buried in paperwork or face a huge price discrepancy when it came to listings. Such experiences led Jad Antoun to start Huspy, a startup streamlining how people in the UAE buy homes digitally.
Over the past five years, the company has grown into one of the largest proptechs in the UAE, and has expanded into Spain, by providing digital tools for finding homes and obtaining mortgages.
Huspy just closed a $59 million Series B to double down on operations across the Middle East and expand its European presence, led by existing investor Balderton Capital.
In 2022, Huspy raised over $40 million in Series A and an extension from a who’s who of global investors, including Balderton Capital, Founders Fund, and Peak XV Partners (formerly Sequoia Capital India & SEA).
Other investors include ExBorder Partners, Turmeric Capital, COTU Ventures, BY Ventures, Dara Management, and KE Partners. The new capital will fuel Huspy’s continued growth in the UAE and Spain and support its launch in Saudi Arabia, Antoun told TechCrunch in an interview.
This investment is significant because proptech has been a tough sector over the past couple of years. Companies like Opendoor and Compass have struggled to maintain valuations and profitability amid higher U.S. interest rates. Many startups have also burned through cash and struggled.
Huspy has “built a repeatable and efficient playbook for city launches, and their pace of innovation — especially around AI tools for brokers and agents — continues to raise the bar for the entire industry,” said Rana Yared, general partner at Balderton Capital.
Antoun said he learned through his first market in the UAE how to target pain points in a country’s mortgage process. He struck partnerships with leading banks and introduced digital pre-approvals on a platform connecting brokers and borrowers.
Within three years, the company says it captured 30% of the UAE mortgage market (25% in Dubai, one of the world’s most active real estate markets). That traction, and the exclusive banking relationships it built as a result, became a springboard for expansion.
In 2022, it began scaling into Spain, a fragmented real estate market with over 100,000 registered agents, according to Antoun.
Rather than owning inventory like iBuyer models or operating as a traditional brokerage, Huspy runs a network-based model across the UAE and Spain. Freelance agents use the platform to access property leads from marketplaces like Property Finder and Idealista, while Huspy provides CRM tools, transaction support, and integrated mortgage products through its banking partners.
It’s a low-overhead approach that resembles Uber for real estate more than Zillow.
Antoun, previously on the investment team at Dubai-based early-stage VC Beco Capital, and deputy CEO Ziad Nassar, who leads Huspy’s European expansion, believe the company has found a repeatable model that will be hard to replicate: enter mid-sized cities with high transaction volume and low agent efficiency, build supply through marketplace partnerships, onboard top-performing agents onto the platform, and layer in mortgage distribution.
In under a year, Huspy claims to be one of the top three real estate companies in Valencia by transaction volume. It already operates in six cities across Spain, where it claims over 20x year-on-year growth.
“I think it’s going to be difficult for someone to compete on the mortgage product specifically across both markets,” said Antoun. “We’ve just been here longer, and in Spain, we have better efficiency.”
Antoun says the startup has helped over 25,000 people buy homes across its markets and has grown revenue more than 10x since 2022. The platform, which earns revenue through commissions and success fees, usually from real estate agents and banks, facilitates over $7 billion in transactions.
Over the next four years, the company plans to launch in most major cities across Europe and the Middle East, a region currently having its proptech moment, with another major player, Nawy, also raising a significant round this year. Huspy plans to operate in over 10 cities by the end of 2025.