Madrid Pitch Club finalists to bring their A game | 2016-09-18 | Global Online Marketplaces

Madrid Pitch Club finalists to bring their A game | 2016-09-18 | Global Online Marketplaces

The finalists for the Pitch Club at this year’s Property Portal Watch conference in Madrid have been announced, with business ideas ranging from image detection technology to a platform for office space rental.

During the flagship Madrid event, six finalists will have five minutes to present their ideas to an expert panel and audience and pitch for funding.

Each participant will describe the problem they are attempting to solve with their idea or current business model, and will detail their company’s specific competitive advantage and explain why they are asking for a particular funding sum.

Each pitch will be followed by a five-minute Q&A panel to allow the judges to ask questions and flesh out finer details of the idea, as well as determine exactly how the funding would be spent.

The event will take place at the conference on Thursday 29 September from 4pm to 6pm, and the judging panel will include top-tier industry representatives from around the globe.

Here’s an overview of the six finalists.

homepad

homePad wants funding to expand its European market. homePad is the first full-stack SaaS platform for rental activities. homePad Pro is a simple and intuitive BtoB and B2C solution to generate and manage digital reports such as property inspections, furniture inspection, task management and service provider’s management. It’s both an iOS and Android mobile application connected to an advanced web platform. More than 970 companies use the homePad Pro version daily and the business model is growing in Europe, specifically France, Switzerland, Belgium and Luxembourg. homePad aims to capture a growing portion of the €1.6 billion European potential market and signs 40 new contracts per month with real estate agencies. Its five-year projection is €10 million per year.
Funding pitch: homePad is asking for €2 million (USD$2.25 million) to expand in Germany and UK and become the leader in Europe.

Mesto

Mesto.ua is an online real estate platform in Ukraine.Mesto.ua is an online real estate platform in Ukraine which combines what it calls the three pillars of success for real estate professionals – customers, education and tools. It offers large amounts of leads for real estate agents and has developed a CRM system that’s fully integrated with a calendar and agenda. It has also launched a side project called Mesto School which trains real estate agents through seminars and webinars, webinars include guest speakers who discuss topics chosen by real estate agents. Mesto also created a mobile app which allows users to add listings on the go, is about to launch a pay-per-call model. The company has already made the first steps towards international expansion and Mesto sees itself as an essential part of the real estate agent’s day-to-day life and a key lead provider for property developers.
Funding pitch: Mesto wants to raise up to US$3 million to dominate the Ukrainian market and also expand internationally with their language agnostic platform.

Homsters

Established in late 2014, the Ukraine-based Homsters has built two platforms in emerging markets: Homsters.kz in Kazakhstan in 2015 and Timhome.vn in Vietnam in 2016. Its mission is to build online entities which, instead of simply advertising properties, truly help buyers on emerging markets make smart property choices. Homsters’ transactional and pay-per-performance monetisation models allow it to provide true value to homebuyers, home-sellers and property developers. It is focusing efforts on markets where a very fragmented infrastructure is set to be replaced by trustworthy online entities. It employs more than 60 professionals working in the IT development centre in Ukraine and offices in Kazakhstan and Vietnam. The number of buyers and sellers using Homsters services is growing rapidly with 5000 customers per month.
Funding pitch: Homester is looking to raise US$500,000 to US$1 million in a pre-series A funding round.

Jagonal

Jagonal is an online platform primarily concerned with office space. It claims current commercial real estate portals provide such a poor user experience for tenants looking for an office that 80 percent choose to use tenant representatives and brokers instead. Jagonal works with major commercial property owners such as Lend Lease, DEXUS and Charter Hall with billions of dollars of commercial property assets and indexes thousands of commercial buildings and makes them searchable across 50 criteria including parking, transport, showers, views, child care facilities, floor plans, CAD drawings and more. It has powerful patent-pending tools for tenants and tenant representatives/brokers to find the right office and solves the leasing problems for landlords and real estate agents, which in turn saves millions of dollars.
Funding pitch: AUD$1.125 million (USD$848,000).

RestB

Restb.ai is an artificial intelligence vision startup based in Barcelona that offers customisable cognitive vision business solutions for real estate. It attempts to solve the problem of pictures on real estate portals that are devoid of metadata descriptions that makes it difficult to sort them or detect image inferiority. There are 20-plus predefined home spaces such as bathroom, kitchen, terrace, garden and more. Doing this process manually is expensive anRestB is an artificial intelligence vision startup.d slow. Based on a proprietary deep learning technology, Restb.ai allows its clients to create fast, efficient and tailored ‘out-of-the-box’ real-time image understanding models that are tailored to each client. Restb.ai’s image recognition API automates tagging, filtering, describing and categorising every uploaded photo and videos. At Madrid’s Property Portal Watch Conference, Restb.ai will introduce its new feature extraction technology for true image content.
Funding pitch: A staggered investment of €2 million (USD$2.25 million) now and a further €4 million (USD$4.5 million) in 12 months’ time.

Investimmo

Investimmo is a Belgian startup which has created a community platform for private real estate investors. Investimmo’s online portfolio tool enables the investor to monitor units, calculate the return, benchmark performance, automate administration and communicate with tenants. Through the same universal tools, Investimmo also offers a B2B concept to brokers, bankers, property portals and financial media in order to give them better insights in their own customer base. Investimmo says it’s an easy way for them to create added value and raise their ARPU in the segment of private investors.
Funding pitch: To be confirmed at the event.

Source – https://www.onlinemarketplaces.com/articles/13552-madrid-pitch-club-finalists-to-bring-their-a-game