“We’re going to be the next Australian unicorn”: Real estate startup ActivePipe raises $5.9 million from NAB

Three-year-old startup and Smart50 finalist ActivePipe is confident it will be one of Australia’s next unicorns after closing a $5.9 million Series A round led by NAB Ventures.

This ends a long search for “strategic” money by the startup, which offers real estate agencies a predictive analytics and data-focused communication platform to help them identify and convert potential property buyers and sellers.

The company raised a “pre-series A” round of $1.8 million in August last year, and founder Ashley Farrugia says the two raises can essentially be viewed as one and the same, with the cash injection from August allowing the startup to “get cracking” on its expansion into the UK market.

Last year, the company reported a revenue of $2 million in the 2016-17 financial year, after growing its revenue by 92.7% over a three-year period.

“We’ve got staff on the ground in London now and we’ve been getting some amazing feedback and take up of the product. We’re also about to set up in Austin, Texas — we’ve just hired our head of country for the USA,” Farrugia tells StartupSmart.

“The UK market opportunity is two to three times Australia’s — they’ve got about 19,000 offices compared to our 8,200 here — but the US market is more like 15 times. They have about 1.2 million realtors.” Read more

Dominic Powell - Smart Company - 9 Feb 2018