Flow - Afrikan Heroes

South African Real Estate Startup Flow Raises $4.5M In Pre-Series A Funding

January 19, 2023

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.

Gil Sperling and Daniel Levy, co-founders and co-CEOs of Flow

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.

“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.”

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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

South Africa’s Startup, Flow Records Impressive Growth With More investment

September 5, 2021

Flow, South Africa’s prop-tech startup Flow is reporting impressive growth figures as it prepares to take on board further investment to supercharge its development. Flow was founded by Daniel Levy and Gil Sperling, Flow goes straight to the source of the largest social platforms in the world – Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn – to match people with property.

Flow was founded by Daniel Levy and Gil Sperling — Flow cofounder, Gil Sperling

“Our technology creates dynamic ads and automated listings at a scale otherwise impossible for estate agents and developers to do. We wanted to incorporate speed and efficiency into the way that people find property to ensure prospective buyers and tenants view relevant, personalised content and listings to match them with the right, tech-savvy agents and developers who are experts in those chosen areas,” Levy said.

Levy and Sperling were previously part of the founding team at Popimedia, one of Africa’s biggest ad-tech and performance marketing companies.

“At the time, Popimedia were the largest buyers of Facebook media inventory in Africa, representing some of the world’s biggest brands. When the company was acquired by global communications group Publicis, we set our sights on the property industry, keen to use the business and technology experience we’d gained to change the way people find places to live and work,” said Levy.

Disrupt Africa reported in January 2019 the startup raised a ZAR20 million (US$1.47 million) funding round from Kalon Venture Partners and CRE Venture Capital, with the platform launching to the public the next month.

“The way the property market works in South Africa hasn’t changed in decades – it’s pretty archaic and doesn’t make use of the hyper-connected world that digital natives, i.e. most people, are used to,” Levy said.

“There are 23 million South Africans currently on Facebook and Instagram, and eight million on LinkedIn. For agents and developers not to be taking advantage of that audience seemed crazy to us. There are existing online platforms like Property24 which do have significant traffic, but we wanted to create a tool that connects both sides of the market more effectively, at scale and automatically allowing agents and developers to focus on doing deals.”

Flow has done just that, with the founding team seeing an opportunity to harness behavioural data about how buyers and tenants go about their search process.

“There’s not a lot of this data at present, and we identified a wide gap in the market for a tool that can generate insights and create positive change. By this I mean not just how property is marketed, but also what buyers want, how tenants are impacted by price, where there are surges of demand, how many properties do people look at, what additional products are useful during the buying process – the list goes on,” said Levy.

“Although we had confidence in our technology and strategy before launch, using social media to sell and rent property is a totally new concept here. The results so far have been fantastic, with 30 per cent month-on-month growth, and based on our proprietary data we’ve seen 10x growth in property-related social spend during the last 12 months and expect that trend to continue,” said Levy.

Indeed, some agents are now relying on Flow for around 90 per cent of their leads.

“It’s that stickiness that has really encouraged us as we prepare for the next phase of growth. To put it into context, nine million South African buyers and tenants have been reached about agency brands and property listings via Flow in the past year. That is 40 percent of all Facebook and Instagram users in the country,” Levy said.

With that next phase of growth in mind, Flow – which in 2020 topped up its funding pot with further investment from Kalon Venture Partners and Vunani Capital – is planning on raising another round of funding soon. The plan is to continue to grow at home while starting to look abroad too.

“We are focused on consolidating the super fast growth we’ve witnessed over the last 12 months. Over 4,000 agents are now finding prospective tenants and buyers through our Flowfuel product, usually direct to their WhatsApp, which equates to about 10 per cent of the country’s agents. Looking further afield, Sub-Saharan Africa is obviously an area we’d like to move into, and we’ve also about to test a few campaigns in markets like Australia and Israel,” Levy said.

“Alongside geographic expansion, our long-term goal is to connect the entire property ecosystem. Searching for a property is only one component of a move. We have plugged in products such as home insurance, contents insurance, mortgage origination, deposit loan solutions, furniture sourcing, appliance maintenance and legal services. It’s an exciting journey as we design a tool that fundamentally eases the process for a new buyer or tenant.”

Flow’s primary source of revenue comes from estate agents, developers and its marketplace partners, with its fee a percentage of the media spend that is deployed on the social channels it uses.

“Looking ahead, there are areas we can tap into alongside partners that will boost our ability to invest in our product and roll out some of the features we have in our roadmap,” Levy said.

Kelechi Deca

Kelechi Deca has over two decades of media experience, he has traveled to over 77 countries reporting on multilateral development institutions, international business, trade, travels, culture, and diplomacy. He is also a petrol head with in-depth knowledge of automobiles and the auto industry