Lisbon-based CASAFARI claims to be the largest independent real estate network in Europe that connects over 15,000 real estate professionals to 95 million property listings. Now, the company announced that it has secured $135 million (nearly £98 million) to expand its innovative Real Estate platform.
UK expansion plans
The investment is split into a $120 million mandate from private equity investors – Geneva based investment group Stoneweg, which will be used to build a portfolio of residential and commercial real estate. Also, the company raised a $15 million Series A equity investment led by Prudence Holdings, a New York-based VC that has backed Compass, Blockchain.com, Uber and Spotify.
The other prominent investors that joined this round include Armilar Venture Partners (leading Portuguese VC behind unicorns Outsystems and Feedzai), Amavi Capital (pan-European Proptech fund) HJM Holdings, 1Sharpe (founders of Roofstock) and FJ Labs (Fabrice Grinda, founder of OLX Group), as well as existing investor Lakestar.
The CASAFARI will use the fresh capital to expand massively across Europe with a primary focus on the UK this year. Already, it operates in a slew of European markets including France, Spain, Portugal, and Italy.
According to Gavin Mayers, Prudence Holdings co-founder, “CASAFARI has taken on the role of aggregating, verifying and distributing this data to key industry participants, providing a continental single source of truth for property and transaction data. Through its innovative technology, leveraging AI and machine learning, we believe its unique data and products will unlock single-family homes as an asset class to institutional investors. We see a tremendous opportunity for Europe to follow the example of the US, where institutional investment in fragmented properties has scaled from nearly $0 to $40 billion in ten years.”
“This isn’t just another data aggregator – it’s an entire operating system that powers real estate agents in real-time, removing the asymmetry of knowledge, accelerating transactions and opening up new opportunities for iBuyers, property developers, investors and Q-commerce operators and beyond to reach their investment objectives.” said Stephen Nundy, partner at Lakestar.
“We started CASAFARI with a mission to organise the real estate market into an efficient data-powered ecosystem to enable and accelerate deals through a transparent and safe B2B platform”, said Mila Suharev, CASAFARI’s Co-CEO and CPO. “This capital raise will help us execute on our planned expansion into Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the UK, establishing ourselves as a dominant pan-European network of real estate professionals.”
According to Nils Henning, CEO, “CASAFARI has built a unique ecosystem, which connects brokers, developers, asset managers and investors and enables sourcing, valuation, underwriting and deal collaboration on single units in all asset classes. We are very excited to represent important institutional clients like Stoneweg and others, in deploying their capital into fragmented acquisitions at scale, bringing more liquidity to the market and generating more transactions to the broker clients of our platform.”
First-of-its-kind real estate network
Founded by Mila Suharev, Nils Henning and Mitya Moskalchuk in 2018, CASAFARI is Europe’s first independent cross-border real estate network. It connects real estate professionals through MLS functions and a clean and complete real estate database covering all asset classes. The company has developed custom applications such as a meta search, comparative market analysis, market analytics, and daily data feed.
The company’s real estate platform will unlock single-family homes as an asset class to institutional investors, opening up new opportunities for iBuyers, property developers, investors and Q-commerce operators and beyond to reach their investment objectives.
Its proprietary machine learning technology and extensive data operations automatically index, clean, classify and match duplicates of millions of property listings from thousands of websites in different languages. CASAFARI’s major clients are from brands such as Sotheby’s International Realty, Coldwell Banker, RE/MAX franchises, Savills, Fine & Country, Engel & Voelkers, and Keller Williams among others.
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