Proptech group, which helps to enhance the advertising of estate agencies has raised nearly R78m in capital.
January 20 2023
Flow has secured $4.5m which it will use to fund its development pipeline, enhance its sales and product teams and roll-out its new B2B offering.
Co-founder and co-CEO, Gil Sperling spoke to Property Flash and explained that this injection of funds would help Flow to grow as a proptech group which is focussed on solving a global platform; “the need to de-fragment real estate industries”.
The money was secured through a pre-Series A investment round.
“We’re delighted that all the strong traction, growth and demand we’ve seen for our work has resulted in the single largest investment in the country’s proptech sector at that stage and among the highest in African proptech funding history,” said Sperling.
“This is an exciting time for Flow. Raising this funding is a vote of confidence in us. We shouldn’t need o raise capital in the next two years. We have not only received funding from our original investors but also new ones have come on board and we are ready to enhance our offering, perfecting what we are doing in different markets” he said.
The investment would help Flow to drive its B2B growth strategy, integrating the power of its social media-driven real estate marketing platform into existing international property portals and customer relationship manager (CRM) platforms.
The $4.5m investment is led by Futuregrowth Asset Management with $2m, followed by Endeavour Harvest Fund and investor Steven Heilbron. Initial investors Kalon Venture Partners, Vunani Fintech Fund and Buffet Investments have also increased their investment in the company.
“We’ve keenly followed Flow’s progress in SA and Australia and integration into the B2B side of the global property industry as the next natural step in the company’s evolution,” said Futuregrowth Asset Management Head of Private Equity & Venture Capital, Amrish Narrandes.
Kalon Venture Partners CEO, Clive Butkow, said that their increased investment in Flow showed their conviction about the power of the platform.
Sperling said Flow would spend the funds to grow and to market its business. I was selling its services to estate agencies directly, wanted to grow its sales team and also its advertising across varied media.
The global property industry faces a massive fragmentation challenge, with millions of agents and thousands of property portals fighting to reach buyers and sellers on digital channels – and they haven’t been able to do so in the way many other verticals have. Our aim has always been to enable property industry growth, helping connect buyers and sellers with agents and portals on the platforms where they spend most of their time – on social media. The industry desperately needs to be brought into the 21st century – and our platform and its APIs enable portals to offer fully-automated off-site advertising on amongst others, social media and digital out-of-home boards at scale, to enable agents and portals to easily target and connect with buyers and sellers, using proven best-practice tools.
Flow may also become acquisitive in the future, according to Sperling.
Flow was co-founded by Sperling and Daniel Levy. The two men previously founded advertising technology and performance marketing company, Popimedia, which was the largest buyer of Facebook media inventory in Africa for some of the world’s biggest brands. Popimedia was acquired by global communications group Publicis in 2015.
alistair@propertyflash.co.za