Speaking with The PIE News, Niels van Deuren said that the funding had helped product development and further global expansion, with Berkeley in California showing great appetite already for the platform.

Further expansion in Europe is an initial focus for the Rotterdam-based company.

But “we are online already in a few cities [in the US],” said van Deuren, revealing that Berkeley had seen high organic traffic “without a lot of marketing efforts” and was in its top 10 cities already.

Van Deuren added that the investment had also enabled Housing Anywhere to hire more engineers and more developers, to improve the customer experience and ensure that students ultimately book a room and can better navigate through the website.

“We received a lot of more user activity on our websites,” shared van Deuren who said staff numbers had risen from 35 to 80 since the investment.

The funding came from Netherlands-based venture capital firm henQ, which had also invested in Housing Anywhere previously, and Real Web, which operates immobiliare.it, a real estate website in Italy and Poland.