Andreessen Horowitz, the outstanding enterprise capital agency recognized for its early investments in Twitter and Airbnb, has pumped about $350 million into Neumann’s latest enterprise, referred to as Movement, in accordance with The New York Instances, citing unnamed sources briefed on the deal. The funding valued the startup at greater than $1 billion, in accordance with the report.
Representatives for Movement and Andreessen Horowitz didn’t instantly reply to requests for remark.
In a weblog submit Monday, Marc Andreessen, cofounder and normal companion on the VC agency, introduced the funding, with out disclosing monetary particulars. He additionally defined his considering for backing Movement, a residential actual property firm, and Neumann regardless of the founder’s high-profile fall from grace at WeWork.
“Adam is a visionary chief who revolutionized the second largest asset class on the planet — industrial actual property — by bringing neighborhood and model to an trade by which neither existed earlier than,” Andreessen wrote in his submit Monday. “Adam, and the story of WeWork, have been exhaustively chronicled, analyzed, and fictionalized — typically precisely. For all of the vitality put into masking the story, it is typically below appreciated that just one individual has essentially redesigned the workplace expertise and led a paradigm-changing international firm within the course of: Adam Neumann.”
It is not instantly clear how Movement seeks to revolutionize the residential housing trade. Movement at the moment has a naked bones web site, with the slogan “Reside life in circulation” and two phrases stating it would launch in 2023.
Andreessen positioned the brand new firm as a long-awaited answer to the nation’s “housing disaster.” He used a mixture of jargon-filled phrases — “community-driven, experience-centric service” — to clarify how the brand new startup would “create a system the place renters obtain the advantages of householders.”
“We predict it’s pure that for his first enterprise since WeWork, Adam returns to the theme of connecting folks via reworking their bodily areas and constructing communities the place folks spend essentially the most time: their houses,” Andreessen wrote. “Residential actual property — the world’s largest asset class — is prepared for precisely this modification.”
Underneath Neumann’s management, WeWork expanded from shared coworking areas with elaborate perks to experiment with gyms, a college and housing. The final of these efforts, referred to as WeLive, let prospects hire a mattress or non-public room in a coliving location, with widespread areas obtainable for yoga, ping-pong and extra.
As soon as valued at $47 billion on the non-public market at its peak, WeWork went via a disastrous try to go public, foiled largely by IPO paperwork that exposed Neumann’s unchecked energy and quite a few potential conflicts of curiosity, in addition to WeWork’s staggering losses. Neumann finally was ousted from his chief government position at WeWork, however walked away with an exit bundle reportedly value lots of of thousands and thousands of {dollars}.
WeWork’s dramatic rise and spectacular failed first try at going public impressed a TV present, which partly portrayed Neumann because the poster little one of startup tradition’s extra.
WeWork finally went public through a particular objective acquisition firm, or SPAC, in 2021. WeWork at the moment has a market worth of about $4 billion.
