Real estate investment platform BrickVest has managed to rake in £2 million from a number of angel investors that includes Jean-Romain Lhomme, former co-head of Europe at Colony Capital. This has become the PropTech firm’s latest financing round, bringing total funding raised to £4 million.
Although it is unusual for a company to announce funding results mid-way through a round, the firm spoke of its decision to extend fundraising after Lhomme joined and persuaded the firm to expand “further, quicker, and bigger” than was originally slated to happen.
Jean-Romain Lhomme did not stop at investing in the funding round. He also made the move of joining the company’s board. He said:
I invested into BrickVest because I believe the company is about to disrupt the model of how to invest in real estate around the globe from small private investors to large institutions.
Launched in 2014, BrickVest raised $1 million in Seed funding back in April 2015 and also received an undisclosed amount of venture capital from Global Founders Capital in July right after. In April 2016, the startup managed to raise a further £1 million in venture funding.
The firm, based in London, has pioneered the creation of a pan-European online crowd investing platform that lets its users invest directly in real estate and allows them to actively manage these investments.
Emmanuel Lumineau, CEO at BrickVest, commented:
We are pleased to have attracted institutional sponsors and trust of thousands of investors and family offices that are seeing BrickVest as a solution platform.
He also said that the firm is all set to speed up the development of its product range with the launch of “dedicated products for larger ticket investors coupled with automated liquidity platform and risk rating analytics”.
The team behind BrickVest holds a track record for real estate, investment services, and technology. Touting 15 members staff, the team includes alumni from Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers, CBRE and Rocket Internet.
Speaking to Business Insider, Lumineau said that the platform seeks to “democratize institutional real estate investing.” He said,
In a nutshell, that means being part of the deal that only the pension funds, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley were doing. Our vision is to be the Bloomberg, the internet brokerage, for real estate investments. We are trying to do that without compromising on the quality of the projects — so they are all institutional deals — without compromising on fund and risk management.
