Placester, a marketing platform that fuses technology and design to dramatically improve the home buying process for consumers, brokers and agents, today announced it has closed a $15 million financing round, bringing total investment in the company to $22 million. Led by new investor New Enterprise Associates (NEA), the round also includes previous investor Romulus Capital. Ravi Viswanathan, general partner at NEA, and Chetan Puttagunta, partner at NEA, will join Placester's board of directors.
'There's a big shift in the way consumers buy homes. Searches begin online and people expect real estate agents and brokers to deliver a Facebook, Google or Amazon-like experience,' said Matt Barba, CEO, Placester. 'Placester empowers agents and brokers to deliver these sort of experiences, building and deepening relationships with their customers. With this round of funding, we'll be growing our headcount from 50 to 100 employees in the next year so we can continue innovating around the ways real estate agents serve their local markets.'
Co-founded by Barba, a former real estate agent, and Frederick Townes, the founding CTO of Mashable, Placester's turnkey marketing-automation platform combines critical real estate data with sleek, modern design to create a seamless home search experience. The Placester platform provides real estate professionals with property listing integration (through MLS), eye-catching visuals, and responsive designs for mobile devices, while also offering marketing tools like lead management, Facebook advertising and Google AdWords. Agents and brokers choose Placester's all-in-one approach, because it empowers them to take their online marketing into their own hands, and to do so more efficiently.
'Real estate agents and brokers spend $25 billion per year in marketing and advertising and within the last five years, the growth in digital spend has been more than tenfold,' said Chetan Puttagunta, partner at NEA. 'Placester addresses a dire need in this massive market by helping agents and brokers make this shift to digital without having to become IT professionals. Placester is a perfect example of technology that helps real estate professionals make their human relationships better.'
For more information on Placester, please visit: https://www.placester.com.
About Placester
Placester fuses technology and design to dramatically improve the home buying process for consumers, brokers and agents. The Placester marketing platform provides real estate professionals with MLS integration, high-resolution visuals, responsive design and mobile optimization, while also offering marketing tools like Facebook advertising and Google AdWords. Currently serving over 100,000 real estate professionals, Placester is the sole website provider for the National Association of REALTORS® member benefits program, REALTOR Benefits®. To date, the company has raised $23 million in funding and is backed by New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Romulus Capital and Techstars.