Founded: July 2020

Partnered since: Seed

Current Stage: Series A

Valuation: N/D

Domain

Fintech

Region

EMEA

Summary

Founded by Remy Fabre and Louis Lambert in Lille, Zefir is a real estate platform with the mission to make home-selling a simpler, faster and more serene process. By buying property directly from prospective sellers – providing a digitised cash offer in as little as three days – homeowners are able to avoid the delay risk of property chains and the often unpleasant and opaque experience of dealing with real estate agencies. In 2021, Zefir registered a transaction volume of €200 million, with ambitions to reach €1 billion in 2022 – 1% of the French real estate market. Early investors include Sequoia Capital, Heartcore, Stride and Kima Ventures. Faraday Partners also co-invested in Zefir’s latest funding round.

Our partnership

Having witnessed the success of the iBuyer business model in North America, Remy Fabre and Louis Lambert, two proven entrepreneurs based in France, launched Zefir to address the so far undisrupted European market. This was an ambitious project and category creation play achieving immediate traction, helping the business to rapidly secure its initial funding round; in April 2021, Zefir raised €4 million from Stride.vc, Heartcore Capital, Kima Ventures, Alexander Chesterman and Shana Fisher. Our partnership began shortly after the Seed round, when Zefir was a team of only 10 people. Today, Zefir stands at 70+ and is growing at pace, with ambitious growth, scaling and expansion plans.

10-70

Team expansion in < 1 year

+95%

Satisfied customers

€24m+

Raised in funding

Key Activities

01

Seed Funding: €4 million

In April 2021, Zefir raised €4 million from Stride.vc, Heartcore Capital, Kima Ventures, Alexander Chesterman and Shana Fisher. Faraday and Zefir’s partnership began at this point as they embarked upon an ambitious growth and hiring plan.

02

Establish Business Priorities and Objectives

Short-term goals included achieving a strong Series A with great investors on board and assembling an exceptional initial team to achieve longer-term milestones and attract other leading talent.  

03

Understand Culture and Dynamic

As is the case with many early stage companies Faraday advises, Zefir had a unique culture – valuing a hands-on and highly collaborative approach. In preparing for our searches, we built out the ways in which these new leaders would integrate into the existing group and incarnate Zefir’s values – being strategic, methodical and a team player.

04

Mapped Sequence for Collaboration

Having established the business’ priorities, we next worked with the founders to define the sequence through which we would collaborate and support them. 

The first step was to bring on board a seasoned but very entrepreneurially-minded Product leader. While the initial product was strong, the Product organisation was nascent and required vision and leadership. The hire needed to be a talent magnet as much as a product expert, embodying the business and acting as a thought leader in the French and European Tech scene.

05

Product

After an extensive mapping of the market, we secured Tony Hagnére. Having been the first product person at BackMarket and scaling it to a team of 40, Tony had the builder mentality and seniority Zefir was looking for, as well as the experience needed to refine a world-class product experience for customers. Importantly, Tony also aligned with Zefir’s culture and values. Hiring such a prominent figure in the product space went a long way in accelerating Zefir’s people growth and employer brand development.  

06

Business Operations

With a top-tier product leader secured, Zefir turned its focus to Operations to ensure the business could scale at the required pace. Being a fairly complex and ops-intensive company, Zefir was looking to hire a senior executive who had successfully led such scaling previously. Victor Schieber stood out – he had built a lot of the operational processes at ManoMano (also a marketplace model) from scratch and built part of the operations for Zalora in Asia. Combined with an entrepreneurial spirit and strong track record in recruiting and managing high-output teams, Victor was the perfect fit to build and oversee the execution of Zefir’s systems and processes. 

07

Growth

With a base of product and operations working to gear the business for scale in France and internationally, growth was the final piece of the jigsaw. This broad role needed to focus on visibility and the acquisition of users. This soon-to-be announced placement is one of the most experienced growth executives in Europe – with unique technical competency, a business mindset and proven track record building high-performing growth/revenue teams. Having led several verticals in one of France’s largest consumer tech companies, she was a stand-out candidate. 

08

Series A Funding: €20 million

In February 2022, Zefir raised €20 million from Sequoia, in addition to earlier investors Stride.vc, Heartcore Capital, Kima Ventures, Alexander Chesterman and Shana Fisher. Faraday also became an investor at this stage. 

Thomas has been instrumental in hiring three key leaders at Zefir. He was super sharp in clarifying our needs and making sure candidates were at the right level of seniority and technical skill.

Thomas really shined when building relationships with candidates and making sure they were super excited about the idea to build a legendary company with us. I highly recommend Thomas if you need to level up your leadership team!

Remy Fabre
CEO & Co-Founder - Zefir

Outcome

Our partnership and programme of Organisational Design and Leadership Hiring attracted confidence from prominent investors as they recognised the experience and skills of the early leadership team. The outlook for the future is the execution of their category creation play and the transformation of buying and selling worldwide.

If you are serious about building a really accomplished company, you need to be integrating Organisational Design, Leadership Hiring and Talent Development. When this is sequenced correctly, it can deliver exponential performance for investors and founders.