• Kosovo-founded proptech startup Rubik closed a $3.5M seed round led by Silicon Valley-based Ulu Ventures.
• South Central Ventures, AAF Management, ERA’s Remarkable Ventures Fund, Green Egg Ventures and Greg Waldorf, former board member at Trulia and Zillow also joined the round.
• The NYC-based real estate startup was founded in 2017 by entrepreneurs Amar Sehic, Krenar Roka, and Tommaso Montagni.
The inspiration for Kosovo proptech startup Rubik came for the three co-founders as they had firsthand witnessed the massive appetite of institutional investors for this niche, as well as the bottlenecks, which were unique to investors trying to allocate institutional capital in single family rentals (SFR). SFRsh are single family residences basically owned and operated as rental properties.
Therefore, Rubik’s solution leverages Machine Learning (ML) to provide financial data on all single family homes, making it easier for real estate investors to instantly find properties that match their investment criteria.
Previously, Sehic, Roka and Montagni worked together on different other projects involving analysis and sourcing tools for the SFR space.
“Harvesting and analyzing data across entire markets, Rubik’s technology is able to identify homes that match the specific buying criteria of each buyer and which are not currently on the market. The startup’s model involves bringing these off-market homes onto their marketplace, without taking ownership, and allowing institutional investors to then purchase the assets through a streamlined manner and with full data transparency,” the company said in a press release.
Since launching the marketplace in 2021, Rubik has managed to make transactions worth more than $12M of single family homes and counts 20 of the largest SFR buyers in the country as its customers.
Developing engineering and other product expansion initiatives
The Kosovo proptech startup now plans to use the funds to grow its transactional volume across current markets by further building out its core data and analytics platform, and by expanding the engineering, sales, and marketing teams.
”With the capital and partners we’ve brought on-board, we’re well positioned to take advantage of the coming real estate market shifts and leverage our early market lead in the space to become the go-to investment platform for institutional single family investors,” says co-founder Tommaso Montagni.
For lead investor Ulu Ventures, Rubik brings a modern solution to the real estate industry.
“Their platform can help reduce transaction friction, better match supply and demand, as well as provide liquidity for homeowners looking to exit,” said Clint Korver, Co-founder and Managing Director at Ulu Ventures.
Additionally, according to Korver, this approach will also modernize a practice that for too long relied upon a network of unrelated service providers and a lack of transaction consistency.
