Wander.com Inc. just closed a $20 million series A funding round, a fair amount of capital for the nascent company that specializes in helping people rent “smart” vacation homes.
Virginia-based QED Investors led the round, announced Feb. 9, with additional money from Redpoint Ventures, Vibe Capital, Kevin Durant and others. Representatives from QED and Redpoint will join the company’s board of directors.
This funding follows Wander's seed round announced in October, bringing the fledgling company’s total funding to $27 million. Wander was only founded in May 2021 but said it now has more than 30,000 users.
The company is based in Austin, though its operations are almost entirely remote — part of a growing trend of businesses with an Austin address but executives and workers spread across the nation or even globe. In its latest securities filing, Wander listed an address of a residential property in Southwest Austin, but all 15 of its employees are remote workers.
According to the announcement, the company will use the funding to grow its property portfolio and hire more employees, all of whom will be remote. The company owns all of the homes on its platform, a unique business model in the vacation-rental space. Many Wander competitors, including Airbnb and Vrbo, rent out homes on behalf of their owners.
Most of Wander's offerings are along the West Coast, according to its website. Company officials said they plan to open dozens more properties across the U.S. in the coming year.
The homes include automated, app-based features like remote door locks and light controls. Notably, each Wander home comes with a Tesla, which renters can use during their stay.
The company is aiming to cash in on an increasingly remote workforce with its product, offering homes stocked with expensive amenities to "digital nomads" who can travel widely while working.
“Our goal is to build the infrastructure to experience the world,” John Andrew Entwistle, founder and CEO of Wander, said in a statement. “We’re scaling rapidly to meet the demand of our more than 30,000 community members, with dozens more properties coming soon. We’re already seeing our vision for the future take shape.”
Entwistle co-founded and formerly served as CEO of cloud-computing startup Coder.
