Luxury Presence, a startup selling marketing software to real estate brokerages, announced today it has raised $25.9 million for its Series B round. Bessemer Venture Partners led the round alongside fellow existing investors Toba Capital and Switch Ventures. Dallas Mavericks basketball player Dirk Nowitzki also participated in the round along with other angel investors, making his first-ever institutional investment.
The Los Angeles-based company, which last raised in January 2020, has amassed a total of $33.3 million since its launch in 2016. Luxury Presence’s product has evolved over this period from a website building tool to a more holistic real estate content management system that now includes a customized home search tool for agents as well as marketing, social media, and lead generation support.
The company serves 3,700 customers, including individual and multi-agent real estate teams. Its customers are concentrated in high-end metropolitan areas across the US and Canada, founder and CEO Malte Kramer told TechCrunch in an interview.
Luxury Presence will use the funds to build new sales products for agents, some of which it expects to announce later this year, as well as to continue iterating the platform’s design and user experience. It will also invest in launching networks similar to its new Global Collective, which helps its 30 member agents, who all have at least $1 billion in individual sales, connect and share opportunities.
The company doubled its headcount in the past year to over 130 employees today, and plans to double it again in 2022, Kramer said. One major growth area for new hires is its 25-person sales team, many of whom will likely be based in the company’s second office in Austin that opened earlier this year.
Kramer said that the recent surge of individuals moving to new states and regions during the pandemic has opened up opportunities for collaboration between agents. Surging demand for second homes has also catalyzed the luxury real estate segment in the past year.
Kramer noted the importance of integration to real estate agents, who he said have not historically embraced new technology solutions.
Most agents are “hiring different specialists for different tasks,” Kramer said.
“They might have different point solutions and software tools. They might have a marketing assistant on a team, they might have a brother-in-law who does their SEO. It takes a lot of time for them to do all those things, and they’re not very well integrated,” he added.
Luxury Presence’s cost-efficient customer acquisition and high retention rates attracted Bessemer, which has backed prominent SaaS companies like Toast and Shopify, to invest, partner Byron Deeter told TechCrunch in an email.
“We watched the pattern recognition closely to see the signs of customer love really taking hold for [Luxury Presence],” Deeter wrote.