Realty Mogul Raises $35M For Its Real Estate Investment Marketplace

TechCrunch: Realty Mogul, a startup that connects investors with real estate projects, announced today that it has raised $35M in Series B funding. The company launched its online marketplace more than 2 years ago with a focus on equity deals funded by individual, accredited investors. (So it was offering a kind of real estate crowdfunding, but one where most people couldn’t invest.)

Co-founder and CEO Jilliene Helman said that while those individuals are still a significant part of the marketplace, Realty Mogul sees  more and more institutional investors making deals – those investors are particularly important for funding large loans.

Helman added that the big selling point for investors is “access to dealflow.”

“We’re sourcing real estate transactions that other people just aren’t seeing,” she said.

Realty Mogul says that it has grown from 10 to 80 employees in the past year, and that the marketplace has been used to fund 240 properties adding up to more than $500M in value.

The new funding was led by Sorenson Capital, with participation from Canaan Partners, which led the $9 million Series A last year. Sorenson’s Rob Rueckert has joined Realty Mogul’s board of directors.

The money will allow Realty Mogul to expand its technology and data science team, Helman said. which in turn will improve its ability to analyze deals and risk.

It seems like there are more and more startups getting into real estate crowdfunding, at least judging from my inbox. When I brought this up with Helman, she said, “It’s definitely become more competitive from the sense of people saying in they’re business … But we’re not running into any online competitors. It’s still such a massive market, and I just don’t know anyone who’s gotten the size and scale that we have.”