CASAFARI, a leading real estate data platform in Europe, has secured an approx. €101.5 million ‘mandate’ from private equity investors, such as Geneva based investment group Stoneweg, to be deployed in a ‘buy-to-let strategy’ in residential and commercial real estate. In addition, the company has also closed an approx. €12.7 million Series A equity investment led by Prudence Holdings.
Founded in 2018, CASAFARI is an independent cross-border real estate network connecting 15K+ real estate professionals, whose team has developed custom applications such as metasearch, comparative market analysis, market analytics, and daily data feed. It also has a proprietary machine learning technology and extensive data operations to automatically index, clean, classify and match duplicates of millions of property listings from thousands of websites in different languages. Since launching around 3 years ago, CASAFARI has grown a team of 90 employees of 24 nationalities, and won major clients from brands such as Sotheby’s International Realty, Coldwell Banker, RE/MAX franchises, Savills, Fine & Country, Engel & Voelkers, Keller Williams, and many more.
“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 Gavin Mayers, Prudence Holdings co-founder: “In Europe, as in most non-US geographies, real estate data has never been structured and organized due to the lack of a unified Multiple Listings Service (‘MLS’). 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.”
Joining the equity round are prominent investors, including 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.
Stephen Nundy, partner at Lakestar, commented: “This isn’t just another data aggregator – it’s an entire operating system that powers real estate agents in real-time, removing 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”.
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.”