Three George Washington University students – Elizabeth Grover, Beatrice Fischel-Bock and Madeline Fraser – pitched their virtual interior design company Zoom Interiors on Shark Tank in May 2015. Their business model then was to provide e-consultations to clients who wanted to design a room, and then followup by providing a digital rendering with a shopping list of items to decorate the room. Barbara Corcoran offered a $100,000 investment for 33 percent equity. But when the founders discovered that they wouldn’t be working with Corcoran directly, they parted ways.
[Zoom Interiors’ Homee app is available for free at iTunes]
After the Shark Tank episode aired, Zoom got a call from Tinder CEO Sean Rad. He said, after watching the show, “I was hoping that the deal would fall through afterwards; I didn’t feel it was the most favorable terms.” Since then Zoom has renamed itself Homee and with Rad’s help, they’ve raised a total of $7.2 million including a $5 million Series A round led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund.
