Israel: Agora, a real estate investment management proptech startup, has closed a $20 million Series A round which will be used to grow the company’s technology and workforce in the US.
The round was led by Manhattan-based global venture capital and private equity firm Insight Partners, with participation from Aleph, an Israel-based venture capital firm. Agora closed the round in three weeks, said Bar Mor, CEO and co-founder of Agora.
The company was founded in late 2019 in Tel Aviv and has raised $9 million in previous funding rounds. It provides customisable, secure software that helps real estate firms automate their back-office processes and increase operational efficiency. Agora automates fundraising, investment management, reporting, payments, document sharing and tax operations.
“We help these companies streamline all the communication interactions with their investors, including reporting money transfers, secure document sharing, helping them manage their KYC [know your customer] and AML [anti-money laundering],” said Mor. “We also handle the onboarding processes when they are bringing new investors to their deals and all the back office financial investor relations work.”
“The majority of [competitors] are what we call the one size fits all — one software that fits real estate, VC, private equity, hedge funds, family offices, and so on,” Mor said. “As things become more of a niche and more complex, there is a huge advantage in staying vertically specific. We stay strictly focused on the vertical of only real estate and we try to bring the combination of fintech and proptech together, not only providing a tool to manage information and to share data, but also to combine different types of services,” he added.
Agora’s customers include LIVWRK, Gaia Capital, Open Path Investments, Electra America, and AmTrust.
