Homelike, an online marketplace for long-term business apartment rentals across Europe, has raised $14 million and brought a new investor – Spark Capital – on board.

Existing Homelike investors Cherry Ventures, Lürssen and coparion also contributed to the $14 million round.

The German business was set up in 2015  – see its tnooz startup pitch from 2016 here.

It offers some 45,000 furnished apartments across 100 or so European cities and has booked 700,000 room nights so far. It focuses on rentals of 30 nights or more and has 15,000 corporate clients with the press release namechecking CapGemini and Thoughtworks.

It is based in Cologne and plans to open an office in London soon. It works with a network of suppliers and offers an end-to-end online platform which can be customised by corporates and which integrates fully into back-end systems.

The cash has been earmarked for the usual areas of scaling the company, product expansion and technology.

Co-founder Dustin Figge said:

“Compared to the online solutions and product features used by the hotel industry, the furnished apartment space is 10-15 years behind.”

Alex Finkelstein, a partner at Spark Capital, put a commercial value on the furnished apartment space:

“Homelike targets one of the fastest growing rental segments with a global market volume of $160 billion that is still mainly served offline by cumbersome processes. We strongly believe that Homelike’s technology platform and convenient user experience will play a significant role in changing the way corporations book long-term apartments.”

New backer Spark is US-based with offices in San Francisco, Boston and New York, with some $3 billion-worth of investments. The roll call of invested companies on its website is broken down into commerce, consumer, frontier, fintech, marketplaces, software & services and media. The only obvious travel and hospitality plays listed are:

• German travel planning platform Tourlane (2018)
• corporate travel tech provider Travelperk (2016)
• short-term rentals business Sonder (2016)

Meanwhile, a search through the tnooz archive shows that Spark was an early (2013) investor in GetYourGuide.

UPDATE: 1530 BST 23 August 2018

A few hours after the Homelike investment story hit the wires, Sonder announced that it had completed an $85 million funding round, led by Greenoaks Capital. Spark Capital was involved, along with Greylock, Structure Capital and Harbourvest.

Sonder also revealed previously undisclosed funding rounds and has now raised a total of $135 million. More details to come.