Amitree raises $7 million to provide a Gmail assistant for real estate agents
Real estate tech startup Amitree is making life easier for real estate agents, which it hopes will make life even easier for the homebuyers they work with. The company has raised $7 million to grow its Folio assistant for real estate agents.
It’s been a long, strange trip for Amitree. The company originally launched with a consumer-facing tool to help usher homebuyers through the closing process. Called Closing Time, that product was a kind of to-do list with all the things a consumer needed to accomplish while purchasing a home.
But you know, buying a home is an event that most people will only do once every decade or so. As a result, it can be tough to get repeat business in the consumer market. So Amitree went back to the drawing board and came up with a new product called Folio that was targeted at real estate agents.
“The best pathway to a better buying experience comes from empowering the real estate agent,” Amitree CEO Jonathan Aizen told me. But almost all innovation in the real estate market to date has been focused on disrupting the agent-buyer relationship. In contrast Amitree wants to create tools to make real estate agents’ lives easier.
Like homebuyers, real estate agents have a list of tasks they have to complete during the process of ushering clients through the process. Unlike most homebuyers, agents will often handle multiple home purchases at any given time. As a result, keeping track of where different buyers are in the process and what they need to do to move things forward can be a monumental task.
That’s where Amitree’s Folio product comes in. Folio is a Google Chrome extension that connects with real estate agents’ email accounts and acts as a smart assistant that processes millions of emails to help understand what is happening with each transaction they manage.
The tool helps agents manage workflow by creating folders for every transaction, and compiles all emails, files and related contact information necessary. Doing so reduces the amount of time they spend searching for various documents, while also providing an easy way to set up reminders to keep projects on track.
Launched about a year ago, Folio is gaining ground in the real estate community. The Chrome extension has been downloaded more than 30,000 times and has managed more than 200,000 transactions to date. That adds up to about 5 percent of all real estate transactions in the U.S., Amitree estimates.
With that growth, the company has successfully raised an additional $7.1 million in funding led by Vertical Venture Partners. The round included participation from existing investors, including Accel Partners and Seven Peaks Ventures, and brings total funding to about $13 million.
According to Aizen, Amitree is using the funding to boost headcount, mostly in its engineering and data science team. While the team included just seven employees during the first three and a half years, Amitree has doubled headcount since the deal closed.