Self-Storage Startup Raises $53M in Series B Funding

Neighbor.com, the self-storage marketplace, has closed a $53 million round of Series B funding.

Neighbor offers a platform for commercial and residential property owners to turn under-utilized or vacant areas into self-storage space. The funding round will enable the company to further expand its brand footprint and user base in the US.

“We have people using it [Neighbor] in all 50 states, and now we’ll be going into all the cities and making sure that a renter has lots and lots of options to choose from so that hosts get rented much more quickly,” Joseph Woodbury, CEO and co-founder of Neighbor, tells GlobeSt.com.

Neighbor also plans to make additional strategic hires and attract more tech talent, building on its bench of recent hires from Uber, Carta, Mercari, Instructure and Banjo.

“We’ll need to fill some administrative roles to help us manage as we scale,” Woodbury says. “We will, of course, be hiring engineering. We are first and foremost a product. We will continue to invest in our product.”

These new employees will be based in Neighbor’s Utah headquarters.

“We’re unique in that we’re not planning on pursuing a remote strategy, like a lot of companies are these days,” Woodbury says. “We’re planning on being fully headquarter-centric in Utah. Over the last year, even in preparation for that, we’ve recruited employees from New York, Florida, Texas, Southern California and Northern California.”

Neighbor’s real estate footprint grew by more than 10 times in 2020. Additionally, it saw a five-times year-over-year increase in revenue from March 2020 to March 2021 and a seven-times increase in organic reservations. The growth came from households using Neighbor to monetize garage, driveway and basement space and commercial owners repurposing vacancies into storage rentals.

While Neighbor had strong growth during the pandemic, Woodbury expects things to intensify as things get back to normal.

“The country has been getting back to normal,” Woodbury says. “And yet February, which was probably the closest month to normal, is the highest growth month we’ve had in a year,” he says. “So things are just accelerating for us.”

Fifth Wall led the round with support from returning investor Andreessen Horowitz. Additional funding was provided by DoorDash CEO Tony Xu and StockX CEO Scott Cutler, who will join former Uber CEO Ryan Graves and Overstock CEO Jonathan Johnson as investors and advisors to Neighbor.

Fifth Wall has also facilitated opportunities for Neighbor to partner with the firm’s more than 65 limited partners from 15 countries. Two of those companies, Acadia Realty Trust and Jamestown, have already begun onboarding properties onto Neighbor’s platform. This will add to Neighbor’s burgeoning commercial real estate footprint, which grew by 10 times in 2020.