Biproxi
Gordon Smith, CEO and cofounder of Biproxi
- Biproxi, a commercial real estate marketplace, just nabbed $10 million in seed funding after launching late last year.
- The company is rolling out a product to see transaction history for commercial office space and a valuation tool reminiscent of Zillow's Zestimate feature.
- The funding was led by Greycroft, a venture capital firm that has made investments in Acorn, the Huffington Post, and Venmo. Other backers include the National Association of Realtors and Newmark Knight Frank, a commercial real estate advisory firm.
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Biproxi, a commercial real estate marketplace, just nabbed $10 million in seed funding and is launching tools to compile transaction history and estimate prices for office spaces.
The funding round was led by Greycroft, a venture capital firm that has made investments in startups such as Acorn, the Huffington Post, and Venmo. Other backers include the National Association of Realtors and Newmark Knight Frank, a leading commercial real estate advisory firm.
Startups that are trying to put a tech spin on old-school real estate businesses have been attracting a wave of venture funding. Those include brokers and services that help put together cash offers to buy or sell homes.
Biproxi launched late last year, and it is now adding an Off Market product, which it says is the first nationwide tool in the commercial office space that allows anyone to see a property's transaction history and estimated price for free.
Three of Biproxi's four founders were former executives at Ten-X, another commercial real estate marketplace that launched in 1990.
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Gordon Smith, the CEO of Biproxi and former executive at Ten-X, said that the vision for Biproxi came from their experiences there. Ten-X's platform allows real estate agents to close a transaction online. With Biproxi, Smith is looking to transform every element of commercial real estate.
"Biproxi is a place where an agent can run a whole business," Smith said to Business Insider.
Similar to Ten-X, Biproxi can process an entire transaction through its web and mobile application, but it also contains marketing and data tools to make it full service.
Biproxi's new Off Market service functions like Zillow for commercial real estate, providing free transaction and financial history. This information is typically paywalled behind a hefty subscription fee at other databases like CoStar and LoopNet, but Biproxi thinks that the company will be able to bring more transactions onto its platform by providing this information. Biproxi makes its money by charging a fee to the buyer upon a complete transaction.
Biproxi is also rolling out its own valuation tool, the biproximate, which is reminiscent of Zillow's Zestimate feature. The commercial real estate world, without a central Multiple Listings System, is generally behind the residential world when it comes to data.
Biproxi, though open to any level of transaction, is focusing its efforts on the middle-market agent. According to Smith, these transactions make up 75% of total commercial real estate transactions.
"Most of them are with smaller firms that generally don't have the dollars to invest in expensive data products or the tech required to market to a national and global audience," he said.
Biproxi is hoping that it can be the industry standard for firms who don't make large, flashy deals, but still need the information that the giants in the field use for their own transactions.
"A $5 million deal takes just as long as $500 million deal," Smith said.