Citi Ventures Archives - Crunchbase News /tag/citi-ventures/ Data-driven reporting on private markets, startups, founders, and investors Thu, 07 Nov 2019 14:26:22 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.8.5 /wp-content/uploads/cb_news_favicon-150x150.png Citi Ventures Archives - Crunchbase News /tag/citi-ventures/ 32 32 Reonomy Nabs $60M For AI-Driven Commercial Real Estate Data Platform /venture/reonomy-secures-60m-series-d-for-ai-powered-commercial-real-estate-data-platform/ Thu, 07 Nov 2019 14:00:50 +0000 http://news.crunchbase.com/?p=22012 , an AI-powered data platform for the commercial real estate (CRE) industry, announced this morning it has raised $60 million in Series D funding led by .

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and also participated in the round along with existing investor . The financing nearly doubles the amount of funding previously raised by New York-based Reonomy for a lifetime total of $128 million, according to the seven-year-old company. It last raised $30 million in June 2018 Series C led by Sapphire Ventures.

Reonomy’s self-proclaimed mission is “to become the primary source of data and analytics for commercial real estate.” It uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to give its users access to “in-depth property details and analysis across the US,” per its website.

Today, over 100,000 users have access to the platform’s information, which according to the company consists of more than 50 million properties, 80 million companies, 300 million people, 38 million mortgages, and 68 million property sales.

Reonomy co-founder and CEO told me he was initially laser-focused on crunching and validating “lots of public and private (CRE) data so that everyone from the broker, lender and developer could use it to do their jobs more effectively.”

The platform can do things like help developers find three contiguous lots zoned in a certain way, for example, or determine what rights they have to build luxury condos in specific area. It can also help brokers find deals for their clients as well as motivated sellers and buyers, Sarkis said.

Reonomy CEO and co-founder Rich Sarkis

Regionally, Reonomy’s focus was at first on the New York market but has since expanded to cover all the major metros of the United States, which was not an easy task until the company turned to using machine learning and AI, according to Sarkis.

The data, he said, was unstructured and siloed. The goal was to create a category of “property intelligence” so that all the players that deal with and interact with properties (from retailers, occupiers, insurance companies and brokers) could access a platform that connected all that data together.

“We were able to build a system of resolving any record in a public and private dataset,” he said. “That was three years ago, and a groundbreaking moment for us.”

Since then, Reonomy has seen its growth accelerate to the tune of “more than doubling revenue” year-over-year, according to Sarkis. It’s also quadrupled its headcount to over 100 compared to about 25 two years ago.

With its new funding, Sarkis said the company is eager to expand its scope even further, and “scale” its products to Canada, the United Kingdom and other global markets. It also plans to expand its machine learning capabilities and applications.

In a former life, I used to cover commercial real estate. It’s a massive industry with lots of moving parts, and there’s more and more venture money being pumped into it. For example, in September, I wrote about , a commercial real estate (CRE) transaction platform aiming to be the “ of commercial real estate,” among other things, raising $10 million in a seed round led by .

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Global Identity Verification Startup Trulioo Raises Series C /venture/global-identity-verification-startup-trulioo-raises-series-c/ Tue, 17 Sep 2019 21:32:40 +0000 http://news.crunchbase.com/?p=20494 Vancouver-based online identity verification startup raised $70 million CAD–just over $50 million USD–in a new round of funding.

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The Series C round, which was led by , brings Trulioo’s total funding to, according to Crunchbase.

Trulioo, which was founded in 2011, allows companies and organizations to run global identity checks. The company, which currently has about 130 employees, plans to hire an additional 70 people by the end of the year and “organically scale,” Trulioo CEO said in an interview.

Digital identity verification is a way to bring opportunity in modern economies to people who aren’t able to migrate to other countries, Ufford said.

“With trust comes opportunity and with opportunity comes economic gain, and economic gain is what’s lining those people up at the borders,” Ufford said.

About half of the new cash will be invested in product and technology, and the other half will go toward growing the sales teams. With global identity verification, the two major areas of investment are in raw data and the software stack, Ufford said. Trulioo needs to acquire more data faster and in more countries and then have the flexible software to process it.

The company raised its first seed round in 2011 and raised its $6 million Series A in March 2014, with as the lead investor. Trulioo has been profitable for several years, Ufford said.

The Series C round also includes investment from , and , according to a statement from the company.

“As we transition to a digital economy, Trulioo stands to support all the types of identity verification that global businesses need today,” Matt Carbonara, Citi Ventures’ managing director of venture investing, said in a statement. “At Citi Ventures, we’re excited to invest in Trulioo’s Series C because its platform is well-positioned to scale with the changes in global identity verification with trust, privacy and inclusion.”

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