Dive Brief:
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Home-selling platform Opendoor announced Monday its COO, Gautam Gupta, will step in as joint chief financial officer and chief business officer.
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Prior to joining Opendoor, Gupta served as head of finance at Uber, where he led all internal finance functions, helped build pricing, analytics and capital markets, and helped the company grow from 200 employees in 2013 to more than 13,000 today. Gupta’s Uber experience makes him “uniquely suited to help Opendoor scale its business,” an Opendoor spokesperson told CFO Dive Monday.
- Once Gupta assumes his dual CFO-CBO role, former Amazon executive Julie Todaro will join the company as a newly created president of homes and services. In that role, she'll oversee market operations, customer experience and home services, which originally fell to Gupta when he was COO. Todaro most recently served as vice president of consumer electronics at Amazon, according to TechCrunch.
Dive Insight:
Over the last two years, Gautam has brought considerable expertise to Opendoor and has been an excellent operational leader, Opendoor’s spokesperson told CFO Dive.
“As the company continues to scale, Gautam's role is evolving to CFO and CBO role while leading our finance, business development, corporate development and growth functions,” the Opendoor spokesperson said.
The company was founded in 2014 and is headed by co-founder and CEO Eric Wu. TechCrunch gave the startup, which operates in twenty cities and employs over 1,300 people, a $3.8 billion valuation.
“I’m thrilled to be taking on additional responsibilities in my role at Opendoor as we continue to work to scale our business,” Gupta said in a statement to CFO Dive. “I joined Opendoor because I shared Eric’s vision to reimagine the home transaction process for consumers — to make buying and selling a home on-demand, frictionless and delightful.”
Opendoor has raised significant capital of about $4 billion. As CFO, Gupta sees this capital as providing the ability for the company to “scale [its] services and operations for homebuyers and sellers in markets across the country.”
Opendoor, based in San Francisco, is considered a disruptive force in residential real estate. It gives home sellers a platform for opting out of having their home listed with a traditional real estate agent. Once sellers put their home on the company's platform, the company makes a preliminary offer based on a quick review and then makes a formalized offer after a more extensive review to determine any repair needs. If their home is sold in this way, sellers avoid the time, hassle, and commission costs of the traditional sales process.
The company is backed by General Atlantic, Hawk Equity, SoftBank, Access Technology Ventures, Lennar Corporation, Fifth Wall Ventures, SV Angel, Norwest Venture Partners, NEA, GGV Capital, Khosla Ventures, GV and more, according to TechCrunch.