Area served Worldwide Employees 200 | CEO Luke Nolan | |
Founder(s) Luke Nolan, Shakil Khan, JP Jones Industry Real Estate, Accommodation, Travel Slogan(s) Find your perfect home abroad | ||
Student.com is an online accommodation marketplace that helps international students find residential accommodation. The company differentiates itself from the other real estate marketplaces by focusing on the untapped student accommodation market, by connecting overseas students to professional landlords; identifying and exploiting a niche in the property market. Student.com was founded by Luke Nolan in 2011 with Shakil Khan and John-Paul Jones joining in 2014. The company’s main office is located in London, England with other offices in Shanghai, New York City and Hong Kong.
Contents
Inception
The company was initially founded in 2011 as Overseas Student Living by Luke Nolan. After working in China for several years, Nolan was regularly called upon by his Chinese friends to help recommend accommodation for students looking to study in the USA, UK and Australia. Recognizing that many other individuals, especially students, were facing similar issues, Nolan realized that there was a potential market for an online student accommodation marketplace that could help in connecting students with trusted professional landlords for their accommodation needs. In 2014, he was joined by other co-founders Shakil Khan, who met Nolan 10-years earlier in Shanghai, and John-Paul Jones. The company rebranded itself as Student.com in 2015 to focus on expanding globally and hired a team of multilingual booking agents.
Growth and funding
In 2015, the company saw $110 million in bookings, listed properties in 426 cities in proximity to 1,000 universities. The company raised combined Series B and C funding of $60 million in 2016 led by VY Capital, Horizons Ventures, Expa, Spotify founders Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon, and Hugo Barra of Xiaomi.
Products and features
The listings on Student.com are displayed on an interactive map subdivided by different neighborhoods. The platform helps in the accommodation search for international students needing to secure a base for their studies from a distance. The website assigns the user to a personal booking consultant, who contacts the student to verify their details and needs, including choice of room, roommate, tenancy length, price and student status. The service is free for students and it takes its commission as a cut from bookings. In April 2016, Forbes revealed that billionaire investor, Jim Breyer invested an undisclosed amount in Student.com.