Big data is transforming the real estate industry. Real estate developers and investors are able to now integrate disconnected data like never before to understand things like a location’s risks, opportunities, and pricing. For example, properties within a quarter-mile of two specialty grocery store leads to higher property values but being within four of these stores correlates to lower pricing. An insight like this could be uncovered manually but it would take countless hours of sorting through data while not even sure what you are looking for. Cherre is a real estate data management platform that allows the real estate industry to ingest disparate sources of data into a centralized platform and provides actionable insights based on the data. By combining non-traditional and traditional data, the platform is able to quickly and efficiently identify discernable patterns, unleashing the power of predictive analytics for investors, developers, and even property and casualty insurers. In 2020, the company was able to secure integrations with forty data providers and grew ARR 3x despite the pandemic slowing down the real estate industry.
AlleyWatch caught up with CEO and Cofounder L.D. Salmanson to learn more about unlocking the power of data for the real estate industry, the company’s strategic plans, latest round of funding, which brings the total funding raised to $75M, and much, much more.
Who were your investors and how much did you raise?
This was our Series B, totaling $50 million. The round was led by Trustbridge Partners, a leading growth equity firm. Additional participants in this round include new investors Glilot Capital Partners and former Goldman Sachs Vice Chairman Mark Schwartz, as well as current investors Intel Capital, Navitas Capital, Carthona Capital, and Silicon Valley Bank.
Tell us about the product or service that Cherre offers.
Cherre is an incredibly powerful data management and analytics platform specifically built for real estate. It provides the world’s largest investors, banks, insurers, and technology firms with a platform to connect and consume all their data, from every source – public and private, internal and external, paid and free, in an immediate and actionable format. For the first time in the real estate industry, Cherre delivers instant deployment of billions of connected data points, instant access to and insight from their entire connected universe, and an instant competitive advantage over their peers. We empower our clients to explore markets and properties in ways that were never possible before and analyze their existing portfolios to generate meaningful operational insight.
Cherre’s products include CoreConnect, its core data management platform and analytics warehouse, and CoreExplore, its new analytics application. CoreConnect is built on Cherre’s mapped and resolved Foundation Data, and connects customers; disparate data into their proprietary analytics warehouse. Customers can access their connected data via a single powerful GraphQL API, or use Cherre’s new CoreExplore application to explore their connected data and derive actionable insights across markets, properties, owners, and portfolios. Cherre’s own real estate Knowledge Graph sits at the core of their platform and was built using machine learning and natural language processing to enrich the graph at scale.
What inspired the start of Cherre?
My cofounder and I both had experience working with companies in the private equity space where we were a part of the digital transformation to connect siloed data to support decision making. While the financial services industry has been completely transformed, the real estate industry has lagged behind and has been incredibly slow to adopt new technology. We knew this was about to change. Our vision for Cherre is to transform real estate decision-making into a science by enabling customers to connect all their disparate real estate data for better real estate, management, and underwriting decision-making.
How is Cherre different?
While many companies might claim they connect real estate data, very few actually do, and none as well as Cherre does. Real estate data is very complex and there is no unique ID to easily connect disparate datasets. On top of that, many of the industry’s data providers do not want to share their data and their IP more broadly, making it more difficult to build a scalable solution to connect disparate real estate data. Between Cherre’s real estate data management and analytics platform, and our growing data partner network, Cherre is in a very unique position to connect data for our customers while creating new opportunities for our data partners made possible by the strength of our platform and network.
What market does Cherre target and how big is it?
Cherre serves the broader real estate industry as well as P&C insurance, real estate technology companies, and even startups who are looking to work with Cherre to develop their product and scale with us.
What’s your business model?
Cherre is a SaaS provider so we charge a base platform fee, and then charge additional fees based on the number and complexity of data sets the customer is looking to connect. Customers can also purchase additional datasets from our Data Partner Connection Network.
How has COVID-19 impacted your business?
The pandemic has actually created a huge opportunity for Cherre. The uncertainty from COVID-19, especially as it relates to real estate, created a major need for data. As companies sought out more data, they realized they the true value lies in connecting everything, establishing a single source of truth, and uncovering actionable insights for decision making.
The pandemic has actually created a huge opportunity for Cherre. The uncertainty from COVID-19, especially as it relates to real estate, created a major need for data. As companies sought out more data, they realized they the true value lies in connecting everything, establishing a single source of truth, and uncovering actionable insights for decision making.
What was the funding process like?
This time around choosing the right partners was very easy. We take our values very seriously at Cherre, we live by them every day and we’d only work with people who share those values and equally see them as the core to everything they do. In Yoon and Trustbridge Partners, we found a partner passionate about changing the world, and equally passionate about doing so while embodying our values. The same goes with Lior from Glilot Capital. We’ve known Lior for eight or so years now, and he’s known Cherre from when it was an idea on paper. Literally. He’s seen us grow and mature over the years, and we were incredibly excited to have them in this round.
What factors about your business led your investors to write the check?
Our new investors put it better than we could:
“The technological infrastructure and high-quality data underpinning Cherre’s platform are unparalleled. The resulting value proposition to both customers in providing a single source of truth for real estate data as well as to data partners in driving distribution is incredibly compelling. We look forward to a long-term partnership with Cherre.” – Yoon Chang, Co-head of the US Investment Team, Trustbridge Partners.
“CRE is a massive sector that continues to grow quickly across the globe, yet it lacks the digital data infrastructure of other financial sectors. We believe that Cherre has built the right solution for addressing the data needs of all CRE players – a unique platform that combines seamless connection with a broad range of datasets with a well-crafted knowledge graph architecture. We are excited about Cherre’s tremendous growth and market leadership, and are thrilled to join their journey to transform how the CRE industry utilizes data to generate valuable insights.” – Lior Litwak, Managing Partner at Glilot and Head of Glilot+, the firm’s early growth fund.
What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?
We have a lot to achieve over the next six months including launching additional features and functionality in our new CoreExplore application, continually expanding our Partner Connection Catalog, pushing new Connections Services updates, and scaling our team to support our rapid growth.
What’s your favorite outdoor dining restaurant in NYC?
Does the Flatiron Room count?
