Data has revolutionized the real estate industry, transforming how properties are valued, bought, sold, and managed. From market analysis and investment decisions to customer targeting and predictive modeling, data-driven insights are now integral to every aspect of the business, enabling more informed decision-making, improved operational efficiency, and enhanced customer experiences. Cherre is a leading real estate data management and intelligence platform that has capitalized on this shift by providing comprehensive solutions that empower firms to harness the full potential of their data assets. Firms can take direct control throughout the entire data value chain as the platform allows for integration of data pipelines, interoperability, remediation of data, and using this data in custom models, applications, analysis, and reporting. The ability to unify data across an entire organization has fueled Cherre to post double-digit revenue growth over the last year, positioning the company for further expansion.
AlleyWatch caught up with Cherre CEO and Cofounder L.D. Salmanson to learn more about the business, the company’s strategic plans, latest round of funding, which brings the company’s total funding raised to $105M, and much, much more…
Who were your investors and how much did you raise?
This was our Series C round and we raised $30M. The round was led by HighSage Ventures, with additional investment from leading real estate enterprise investors Nuveen Real Estate, RXR (RADV), certain principals of TA Realty, and others, as well as current investors Trustbridge Partners, Glilot Capital Partners, Intel Capital, and Carthona Capital.
Tell us about the product or service that Cherre offers.
Cherre is a data management and intelligence platform specifically built for the real estate industry. Cherre gives clients direct control over moving, standardizing, and managing their data, while providing the visibility, observability, and validation tools needed to improve data quality, support governance strategies, and establish data lineage in a world of rapidly shifting operating models.
What inspired the start of Cherre?
Back in 2016 when Cherre was just an idea, we saw the financial services world rapidly changing with every aspect becoming digitalized. Trading had become almost completely electronic, and data was the currency of the new world in finance.
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 so we set out on a very ambitious mission to connect all real estate data.
When we started Cherre, most people thought we were crazy. To a certain degree they were right. But Cherre, and the industry, has come a long way. We’d like to think that Cherre has inspired the real estate data ecosystem to be more open to partnering and working together for our mutual clients.
How is Cherre different?
Real estate possesses immense volumes of diverse and interconnected data—spanning financials, market trends, and property specifics—which is frequently handled by multiple stakeholders across various workflows in an organization. This complexity introduces significant risk for human error throughout the decision-making and governance value chains. Cherre sets itself apart from other data management platforms by offering clients unparalleled transparency and control over their real estate data pipelines and transformations. Cherre clients can collect and connect their siloed data from disparate systems, then intentionally and purposefully deliver it downstream for process consumption.
Unlike traditional solutions, Cherre empowers clients with real-time observability, validation, and error remediation tools across the entire data lifecycle, ensuring that clients can improve data quality and accuracy over time. Cherre’s data model is flexible and agnostic, enabling clients to add new, or more, data pipelines and transformations without having to build new models every single time for every source. Cherre’s comprehensive ecosystem of the industry’s largest data providers, applications, and solution and service providers creates a full ecosystem that supports clients across all their data needs.
What market does Cherre target and how big is it?
The global real estate market is estimated at to between $37-40T, and data is the connective tissue for all players across that market. Cherre is a fit for both the large real estate enterprise organizations, as well as the mid-market companies.
What’s your business model?
Cherre is a subscription-based, SaaS model.
How are you preparing for a potential economic slowdown?
Fortunately, Cherre isn’t directly affected by capital and real estate markets. To a certain degree it affects fundraising, but so long as you deliver on high-margin growth you can attract good capital. For what Cherre does, our clients’ budgets have increased every year in both good and bad markets.
What was the funding process like?
We are fortunate to attract good capital sources and regularly have conversations with great folks who want to be part of the Cherre story. In this round we really wanted to bring in a mix of financial investors that can help us grow to a very large company, and strategic investors that can help us continue to feel the market and meet its needs.
What are the biggest challenges that you faced while raising capital?
Finding the right partner is always the most challenging part of fundraising. Good companies always have options for capital and acquisitions so it’s a matter of finding the right fit. We were admittedly a bit picky as we went through the process to ensure we found the right partners to set ourselves up for long-term success.
What factors about your business led your investors to write the check?
Investors typically want to see two things – a grand vision that will change the world (which also translates into returns for them), and past performance to justify them betting on you to deliver on that vision. We are very attractive to investors in both regards.
What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?
Over the next six months we will be focused on increasing our observability and validation features, innovating on our Platform UI, and exploring new data intelligence and AI capabilities to further enable our clients to derive actionable insights from their data. We’ll also continue to scale and grow as a company so that we can increase the way we go to market with our partners, providing them with the tools they need to solve for their own clients’ challenges.
What advice can you offer companies in New York that do not have a fresh injection of capital in the bank?
Have a good, compelling vision and have the metrics to back it up. If you don’t have that, go find product market fit.
Where do you see the company going now over the near term?
Similar to what we’re doing over the next six-months, continuing to innovate, grow, and build the necessary parts of the business to reach our next growth milestone.
What’s your favorite fall destination in and around the city?
Fall is my favorite time to stay in NYC so I can’t pick just one!
