Buying or selling a home can be a stressful affair. Real estate agents rarely make the process any less stressful. The real estate industry is ripe for disruption, and many tech companies have been coming up with innovative solutions to automate many of the existing archaic processes.
Real estate is, reportedly, the biggest consumer expense globally (mortgage, rent, maintenance, energy). The industry has the power and opportunity to address these issues in the sector, i.e. apartment shortages, access to homeownership, and sustainability.
This is where a Helsinki, Finland-based real-estate startup, Kodit.io, wants to make a difference. The company provides homeowners a stress-free way to quickly sell their homes for a fair price.
Kodit.io raises €100M
In recent development, the company has raised €100M in a combination of equity and debt funding, led by leading Nordic real estate investor NREP.
The raised capital will be used to scale Kodit.io’s reach in existing operational countries including Finland, Spain, and Poland, as well as expand into new geographies.
About Kodit.io
Founded in 2017 by Kalle Salmi, Kodit.io has built a machine learning-powered real estate data platform to give home sellers instant cash offers and to provide home buyers with renovated move-in ready homes.
The company claims to have become Europe’s leading iBuyer (instant home buyer). Kodit.io has recently launched a tech-driven real-estate brokerage and is expanding to provide flexible living solutions with the aim of becoming a destination for all housing needs.
For home sellers, the company gives instant cash offers on their homes and provides them with an opportunity to lease back their old home so they can avoid temporary housing arrangements. As for buyers, it offers fully renovated homes and the opportunity to trade in their old home for a data-based market price.
“We have grown to a level where we are ready to absorb institutional real-estate capital and I could not think of a better partner than NREP to do that with. They are true forerunners and innovators in the real estate industry,” says Kodit.io founder, Kalle Salmi.
NREP is recognised as a real-estate innovator in the Nordics and has over 260 employees and more than €5.5B assets under management. The Kodit.io investment is a natural fit for NREP’s strategy to invest in platforms that drive the real estate industry towards a more sustainable and customer-centric future.
According to the company, the ongoing pandemic and worsening economic situation has increased the demand for more flexible services in the residential real-estate sector and accelerated the adoption of digital services. “We are seeing increasing demand for our services and are super excited to have an improved capacity to make a positive impact in people’s lives,” says Salmi.
Previous fundings
Back in mid-2019, Kodit.io raised €12M in a funding round to help build its expansion through Europe. Investors in this round included New York-based FJ Labs, Austrian Speedinvest, and Spanish All Iron Ventures, as well as Norwegian Adevinta (formerly Schibsted Marketplaces) that owns leading marketplaces in 16 different countries.
Prior to that, in 2018, the Finnish company had raised €1.7M in its seed round of funding to expand into new European cities. The round was led by Speedinvest x and Norwegian international media group Schibsted, with Icebreaker.vc providing additional funding.
Image credit: Kodit.io
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