Flow, a South African digital real estate startup, has raised $4.5 million in pre-Series A funding with the aim of revolutionising how real estate companies, developers, and brokers connect with their end clients.
With a $2 million investment, Futuregrowth Asset Management headed Flow’s pre-Series A round. Additionally, current investors Kalon Venture Partners, Vunani Fintech Fund, and Buffet Investments increased their investments. Participants included Endeavor Harvest Fund and serial entrepreneur Steven Heilbron.
With the money, Flow plans to expand to additional social media sites like TikTok and LinkedIn as well as other ad channels like digital out-of-home billboards. Gil Sperling and Daniel Levy, co-founders and co-CEOs of Flow, will use the investment to push the company’s B2B development plan and incorporate Flow’s social media-driven real estate marketing platform into current global property portals and CRM platforms.
Why The Investors Invested
Since its inception, Flow has gained significant attention. The platform is being used by over 300 clients, each of whom is a real estate firm or developer with 15 to 20 smaller agents in each office. Flow is utilised by almost 6,000 agents in South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Mauritius, and Australia. It is in discussions with partners, primarily property portals and CRM platforms, to expand into Europe (France, Germany, Belgium, and the United Kingdom), where it will face stiffer competition — which the co-founders hope Flow will edge out with its technology and attention to design — but a larger market base.
“We’ve keenly followed Flow’s progress in South Africa and Australia and integration into the B2B side of the global property industry as the next natural step in the company’s evolution,” says Futuregrowth Asset Management head of Private Equity and Venture Capital, Amrish Narrandes, on the investment. “We share Daniel and Gil’s vision to bring the property industry into the 21st century and know they have the expertise and experience to make it happen — and we’re pleased to be able to be part of a South African company taking bold steps that will bring much-needed change to an essential global industry.”
A Look At What The Startup Does
Sperling and Levy launched Flow in 2018 as an app that rewards tenants for paying their rent on time. Prior to Flow, however, the founders founded Popimedia, an adtech and performance marketing company that was the largest buyer of Facebook media inventory in Africa for some of the world’s biggest companies. While they sold Popimedia to global communications organisation Publicis in 2015, they used some of the insights they gathered while running the company to pivot Flow into its current business model three years later.
“With our first adtech business, we never dealt with real estate or property as we could never really service them in this country [South Africa]. And the biggest problem was that as much as real estate is the biggest asset class in the world and very valuable vertical, it is the least innovated around because it’s just highly fragmented,” Sperling said in a statement.
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“When buying and selling homes, if you take South Africa, for example, 40,000 agents are marketing 300,000 listings at any time. Every agent is essentially a little small business because they’re commissioners, and there’s no way that they can afford to each have a marketing, data science department, and design department like big businesses can, and that is one reason why we couldn’t conduct ads or performance marketing for many of them.”
The creators of Flow want real estate agencies and property developers that they couldn’t reach with their previous firm to engage with clients through digital channels. The proptech business automates real estate agent marketing for developers, collaborating with real estate websites to collect listings and automatically create advertising on Facebook, Instagram, and other digital platforms.
According to Flow, its proptech marketing platform boosts agent revenue and property buyer and seller experiences. Levy, on the other hand, points out that the firm gets money when these agents utilise its SaaS platform and by taking a part of their marketing budget. He also stated that revenue has increased by 20% month after month over the last year.
“Our route to market, for the most bit, has been going door-to-door from franchisor to franchisee to different offices within that group. And over the last couple of months, we’ve identified the enterprise channel, as we call it, which is more associated with strapping on our technology to portals,” stated the co-CEO. “So our next phase of traction and growth will come from those relationships, which are significant in our world. And that’s why we’ve just gone through this capital raise to experiment with that essentially.”
Charles Rapulu Udoh
Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based lawyer, who has several years of experience working in Africa’s burgeoning tech startup industry. He has closed multi-million dollar deals bordering on venture capital, private equity, intellectual property (trademark, patent or design, etc.), mergers and acquisitions, in countries such as in the Delaware, New York, UK, Singapore, British Virgin Islands, South Africa, Nigeria etc. He’s also a corporate governance and cross-border data privacy and tax expert.
As an award-winning writer and researcher, he is passionate about telling the African startup story, and is one of the continent’s pioneers in this regard