Flow, a South African company that helps businesses to gain online presence and leverage on digitization has raised $4.5 million in a pre-series A. The startup aims to use the fund to expand its products and accelerate its growth strategy.
Founded in 2018 by Sperling and Levy as an app for the real estate sector, the platform facilitates businesses in building their online presence and monetizing through ads.
“Flow automatically creates ads from your listings and brand profiles and targets them at the right people on Facebook, Instagram, Google and Digital Billboards, to build your brand and generate leads straight to your agents mobile,” the company says on its website.
The new round of funding will help the startup drive its B2B growth strategy. It was led by Futuregrowth Asset Management with $2 million, followed by Endeavour Harvest Fund and serial entrepreneur & investor Steven Heilbron.
With our first adtech business, we never dealt with real estate or property as we could never really service them in this country [South Africa]. And the biggest problem was that as much as real estate is the biggest asset class in the world and very valuable vertical, it is the least innovated around because it’s just highly fragmented,” Sperling said in an interview with TechCrunch.
The company hopes to leverage data in helping real estate players to broaden their marketing scope.
When buying and selling homes, if you take South Africa, for example, 40,000 agents are marketing 300,000 listings at any time. Every agent is essentially a little small business because they’re commissioners, and there’s no way that they can afford to each have a marketing, data science department, and design department like big businesses can, and that is one reason why we couldn’t conduct ads or performance marketing for many of them.”
Flow intends to integrate other social media platforms such as TikTok and LinkedIn as well as other advertising challenges in helping real estate agents reach the market with ease.
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