From Slack and Facebook, to Skupos and Checkr, Bay Area companies continue to see Denver as a natural expansion point.
Following that trend, San Francisco-based real estate tech startup Snapdocs has raised a $25 million Series B round and announced plans for its new Denver office.
The round was led by F-Prime Capital, with participation from previous investors Sequoia Capital - who led Snapdocs’ Series A - Freestyle Capital and Founders Fund.
As part of the funding round, David Jegen of F-Prime Capital will join Snapdocs’ board of directors.
While the company announced its Denver expansion in tandem with this funding, Snapdocs head of marketing Mike Phillippi said the raise will primarily be used to build out the company's platform. Snapdocs is a digital loan closing platform for lenders and title and escrow companies.
The platform currently powers over 10 percent of all U.S. residential mortgage transactions, roughly equalling $150 billion in real estate transactions annually, the company said.
As it continued to grow, Phillippi said Snapdocs needed to look outside the Bay Area to attract the talent it required.
Snapdocs considered a dozen cities before landing on Denver, a decision Phillippi said became obvious for him.
“Denver has a great culture and talent pool in everything from tech to customer service and sales,” he said.
The company's local hiring plans are aggressive, as it aims to hire up to 635 people in Denver over the next eight years, across a variety of roles.
Phillippi said the initial focus will be on engineering and operations positions, but the company will hire for any position, as long as the candidate is right.
"In a perfect world, we’ll scale really quickly in Denver," he said.
Snapdocs currently has 10 employees in Denver, with three open positions posted on its website, and about 100 employees total across the two offices.
When asked about the migration and expansion of Bay Area companies to Denver, Phillippi said he expects it to continue as the hiring market remains competitive.
"I think companies in San Francisco will continue to look outside San Francisco, there’s a finite amount of talent in San Francisco and there is a lot of aggressive hiring," he said.
