IMMO Investment Technologies, based in London, Hamburg and New Delhi, has raised €3m additional capital from FinTech Collective & Surplus Invest in its oversubscribed Series A financing round.
This investment brings the total Series A to €14m, having seen participation from investors such as Talis Capital and HV Holtzbrinck Ventures.
The company has raised over €60m in real estate capital for deployment through its residential real estate platform.
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IMMO was recently recognised by the World Economic Forum recently as a global technology pioneer in the real estate field.
Founded in 2017, IMMO buys residential properties directly from consumers on behalf of professional investors, providing investors with desired real estate exposure at scale.
Through the COVID-19 crisis, IMMO has invested in new technologies, including virtual 360 viewings, online credit checks and digital contracts for renters.
IMMO provides technology to source, appraise and acquire single units at scale, thereby opening up single unit residential real estate as a new asset class for institutional investors.
In the past year, IMMO has assessed more than 10,000 property leads (totalling €3.5bn) using proprietary machine learning technology, which combines property-level data with other data-points such as traffic nodes, crime statistics, school, restaurant and AirBnB ratings, and distance to supermarkets.
Hans-Christian Zappel, CEO and founder of IMMO, said: “Now more than ever before, we find that investors are looking to residential as a safe haven investment asset class.
“We have built a sourcing, renovations and property management machinery that allows us to quickly assemble €100-500m sized residential portfolios, made up of single unit assets in a matter of months, that generate very attractive stable returns almost instantly.
“The demand for residential is increasing, and we are confident to deploy scalable capital and generate superior-to-market returns for our investors across European markets.
“Our proprietary IMMO Intelligence technology helps investors target specific locations within any European city, to get their desired risk-return exposure.
“The success of single unit residential (SUR) as an investment asset class in markets like the US has been very encouraging for us.”
Jannis Roser, managing partner at Surplus Invest, said: “The IMMO team has impressed us with their outstanding and highly complementary expertise relevant to all areas of the business.
“IMMO is uniquely positioned to open up residential real estate as an asset class for institutional investors by overcoming previously existing barriers to entry through the intelligent use of technology and data.”
Gareth Jones, managing partner at FinTech Collective, added: “Residential real estate is one of the largest alternative asset classes in the world, representing nearly €40tr in total value in Europe alone.
“However, it is incredibly difficult for institutions to invest in at scale, with only 2% of residential properties currently owned by institutional investors.
“We were attracted to IMMO as they are building the real estate asset manager of the future – data driven and tech enabled, providing a unique platform for institutional asset owners to find attractive and uncorrelated yields in an asset class they consistently want better access to.
“It would be difficult to overstate the size of the opportunity in front of IMMO today.”
Avinav Nigam, co-founder and COO of IMMO, said: “For our tenants, IMMO homes are always modernised to a high standard, beautifully designed and furnished as per tenant needs.
“We want our tenants to have the comfort of knowing that they will feel at home. With FinTech Collective and Surplus Invest, together with Talis Capital and HV Holtzbrinck ventures, we are proud to have some of the top venture investors in Europe and the US part of our journey to disrupt residential real estate, the biggest asset class in the world.
“Now more than ever, the trend towards work-from-home is increasing, as people move outside of city centres and into suburban areas.
“We are seeing this trend across cities in Europe.
“As a result, there’s increased demand for a standardised, quality rental product within the single-family residential sector that IMMO can uniquely offer.”