CREXi, a technology platform for the commercial real estate market, has raised $30 million in Series B funding led by the real estate arm of Mitsubishi to build out its three-pronged business model: a subscription service for brokers, an analytics service for tracking real estate trends, and an auction service.
Since the last round of investment in 2018, CREXi has added 300,000 properties available for sale or lease to its platform and grown its subscriber base to six million users.
Mike DeGiorgio, founder and CEO of CREXi, told Cheddar that the Los Angeles-based company has prioritized creating an open marketplace, rather than putting up cost barriers.
"We're trying to keep most of the marketplace completely free," he said. "We think that everything in commercial real estate today has been pay to play — pay to access data, pay to list the property, pay to see what's for sale and what's for lease. We want a free marketplace."
Once the commercial real estate market has come together in one place, he added, then the company can charge for add-on features and enhanced functionality to generate revenue while keeping the basic services free of charge.
One way that the company will use the new investment is to improve its data service, which tracks information such as the amount of time it takes for offers to be submitted on properties.
"We want to be able to use a lot of artificial intelligence and machine learning to expand on that data offering," DeGiorgio said.
CREXi kicked off its auction business last year with a deal to auction off 17 different properties for Clark County, Nevada. The goal is to build up that side of the business as well so that the company has value in times of recession as well, according to the CEO.
Along with the Japanese real estate giant Mitsubishi leading the round, additional investments came from Prudence Holdings and Industry Ventures.
"The CRE industry is evolving, and market players, especially younger, digitally native generations are seeking out platforms that provide free and open access to information," said Gavin Myers, general partner at Prudence Holdings. "CREXi directly addresses this market need, providing fair access to a range of CRE information."
