Ziroom

Ziroom (自如) is a Chinese long-term apartment rental and housing-asset management company headquartered in Beijing. Founded in October 2011 by Xiong Lin and a team of former HomeLink (Lianjia) real-estate professionals, Ziroom leases apartments from individual owners, renovates and furnishes them, and sub-leases them to tenants under a "C2B2C" model, alongside services such as cleaning, moving, and maintenance. The company has grown into China's largest institutional long-term rental housing operator, managing close to one million rooms across roughly ten major cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Tianjin. Ziroom raised a series of large private rounds between 2018 and 2019 -- a $621 million Series A led by Warburg Pincus, Sequoia Capital China, and Tencent; a $500 million Series B led by General Atlantic; and a $1 billion strategic investment from SoftBank Group -- reaching a valuation of roughly $6.6 billion by late 2019. Ziroom explored a Hong Kong IPO that could have raised around $1 billion as early as 2023, working with Citic Securities, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley, but that listing was never completed and the company remains privately held. More recently, Ziroom has pursued institutional-capital partnerships, including a February 2025 rental-housing joint venture with Invesco Real Estate ("Izara Holdings"), and consumer-finance partnerships such as an October 2025 "Rent First, Pay Later" service with JD Technology.