Casafari secures $135 million to expand in Europe
The company has closed a $120 million deal with a consortium of European private equity funds. At the same time, Casafari raised $15 million through a Series A financing round.
Casafari, a real estate data platform launched in Lisbon in 2018, has closed a $120 million deal with a consortium of European private equity funds, including Swiss investment group Stoneweg, “to create a portfolio of residential and commercial real estate targeted at European institutional investors”, the company announced in a press release. At the same time, Casafari raised $15 million through a Series A financing round.
In the $120 million deal, Casafari “was mandated to identify, select and negotiate the acquisition of over 700 residential and commercial properties with long-term rental and valuation potential.”
But in addition to the million-dollar contract, the company raised $15 million “through a Series A funding round led by Prudence Holdings, a US venture capital firm” that has previously financed companies such as Uber and Spotify. This amount included funding from Armilar Venture Partners (a Portuguese venture capital company), Amavi Capital (a Belgian venture capital fund), HJM Holdings, 1Sharpe and FJ Labs (Fabrice Grinda, founder of the OLX group), as well as current investor Lakestar.
Gavin Mayers, the co-founder of Prudence Holdings, as quoted in the press release, says that in Europe, “real estate has never been structured and organised due to the lack of a unified Multiple Listing Service” and that Casafari “has taken the lead in aggregating, verifying and distributing this data to the most important players in the market, offering a single source of true real estate and transaction data information.”
In fact, Stephen Nundy, partner at Lakestar, considers Casafari “is not just another data aggregator – it is an entire operating system that helps real estate professionals in real-time, that removes knowledge inequality, that accelerates transactions and that opens new opportunities for iBuyers, developers, investors, and Q-commerce operators, among others, to achieve their investment goals.”
Also as quoted in the same press release, Mila Suharev, co-CEO and CPO of the company, refers that the success achieved leaves them “safe to take the next step in expanding into Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the UK,” establishing themselves “as the leading pan-European real estate transaction network.”