Seattle-based startup Porch, which last month landed a big partnership with home-improvement giant Lowe’s, has tripled in size to more than 100 employees in less than five months and is consolidating its engineering operations at its new Seattle headquarters by moving a dozen employees from San Diego.
The growth is expected to continue. The well-funded startup is continuing to hire across its business, seeking to fill positions including chief technology officer.
“It is the right time to make sure we have a leadership team in place that is together and is going to scale this thing to the next level,” said Porch CEO Matt Ehrlichman. “The business is in really great shape, and it’s just about execution for now, which is why that CTO role is so important.”
The new technology chief will fill a position originally held by one of Porch’s co-founders, Eric Schleicher, who guided Porch’s technology team as the company amassed the large amounts of remodeling data that provides the foundation for the Porch service. Schleicher, based in San Diego, isn’t making the move to Seattle with the rest of the team.
Ehrlichman has said he wants Porch to become Seattle’s next big tech company, using data to help people make better home-improvement decisions, while connecting home-improvement professionals with customers.
The company has compiled data on 90 million projects, including photos and project cost in many cases. The information is available free to homeowners on Porch.com. More than 1.5 million professionals are in the company’s database. Porch makes money by charging pros for market insights and promotional exposure in specific geographies.
To accommodate its growth, Porch has moved into a new headquarters on Eastlake Avenue in Seattle, in a building that was previously the headquarters of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The company has taken 17,000 square feet and has the ability to expand in the future to a large block of additional space in the same building.
Investors in Porch incude Silicon Valley angel investor Ron Conway, former eBay president Jeff Skoll and Seattle’s Geoff Entress.
In addition to Zillow Digs, from Seattle online real estate startup Zillow, Porch competes with Houzz, which raised $35 million earlier last year from Sequoia Capital, Comcast Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Yammer founder David Sacks.
