The business proposition behind RealtyMogul may sound a little odd: you and other accredited investors from around the internet can put money into an apartment building in Florida, or a storage locker service in California, and reap the proceeds together. But the concept appears to be popular: on Tuesday, the Los Angeles-based company announced a $35 million funding round, which it intends to use for hiring more data scientists and expanding its technology platform.
“We’re using tech to create much a better user experience for real estate,” CEO Jilliene Helman said by phone, explaining that the company uses proprietary tools to pull in data from companies like Core-Logic and Zillow, and combine that information with predictive analytics.
All of this is intended to offer special opportunities for investors seeking exposure to real estate, and to offer borrowers a new source of capital. Helman says RealtyMogul already has 20,000 investors in its database, and that recent projects include a $750,000 loan in Brooklyn and one for $450,000 in Morristown, New Jersey.
RealtyMogul does not accept investments from small investors, but only from accredited and institutional investors. She views the company as a “single aggregator for all that capital,” and says conventional real estate investment firms, which are typically funded from only a few sources, are beginning to take notice of it.
Helman declined to disclose revenue or growth figures, but said the company is not yet profitable. For now, Helman says the focus is on ramping up on volume. She added that compliance and legal issues figure prominently in RealtyMogul’s costs, but says these will decrease relatively as the company gets bigger.
In the last year, the company has grown from 10 to 80 people, and Helman expects it to employ 100 staff by the end of this year.
The Series B funding round announced on Tuesday was led by Sorenson Capital. Additional funding came from Canaan Partners, which was the lead investor in the company's Series A financing in March of 2014.
"We're seeing online marketplaces massively transforming other industries, and RealtyMogul.com's growth path clearly shows they're poised to be the key disruptor in the huge asset class of real estate investing," said Rob Rueckert, head of Sorenson Capital's technology practice and RealtyMogul.com board member in a statement.
