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Here's investor Keith Rabois' bold new home-selling startup: OpenDoor

Image Credit: Jo Anslow/Flickr

Entrepreneur and investor Keith Rabois teased us with his fascinating plans to help people sell homes fast with the help of the Internet. But he wouldn’t give us the details.

But now we know the secretive outfit’s name, we can identify a key cofounder, and we see that it has funding.

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The startup’s name is OpenDoor. It has raised at least $6 million out of a $9 million round, according to a filing submitted today to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

And who submitted the SEC filing, you ask? Eric Wu, the founder of stealthy neighborhood data startup
Movity, which Trulia bought in 2010. Wu also founded RentWiki, which was renamed RentAdvisor, which Apartment List acquired last year.

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Rabois’s startup was code-named HomeRun, and the seed for the idea was planted more than a decade ago, as VentureBeat reported in April.

“My friend [PayPal and Palantir cofounder] Peter Thiel suggested that I come up with an idea to innovate in residential real estate,” Rabois told VentureBeat in April. “It’s the largest part of the economy unaffected by the Internet. And that was definitely true then, and even with things like Trulia and Zillow, it’s fundamentally true today. But the process of [selling a home] hasn’t been transformed by technology.”

Now, that could change. OpenDoor will launch in July, its website promises.

The startup will “work with sellers directly to purchase home[s],” “work with local partners to rehab, maintain, and improve our portfolio of properties,” and “partner with local brokers and Realtors to market, list on [the multiple listing service], and resell to retail buyers and investors,” according to the site online now at opendoor.com.

That description sounds even more interesting than what Rabois told us originally. It shows that OpenDoor will do a lot more than just run a self-service website.

“We don’t have more information to add at this time,” Rabois wrote in an email to VentureBeat after this article was posted.

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Additional reporting by Kia Kokalitcheva

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