Real Estate Tech Company Localize Raises $25M To Improve House Hunting

Israeli-founded real estate tech company Localize raised a $25 million Series C financing round led by Pitango Growth, with additional participation from Mizrahi-Tefahot and existing investors, the firm announced on Wednesday. The investment brings Localize’s total funding to date to $70 million.

Founded in 2012, Localize built a real estate market platform for buyers and agents powered by an AI-based insight engine that analyzes billions of data points on properties and neighborhoods. This creates “hundreds of selectable attributes, including proximity to popular stores – for example, Trader Joe’s, future construction, high ceilings, building violations, complaints and pests, and a proprietary natural light insight,” the company explains.

Homebuyers can easily tailor their searches with these attributes through a homebuying advisor called Hunter, the company’s hybrid human-AI concierge service. The company’s main mission is to make homebuying easier, more tailored, and more effective. It currently operates solely across New York, where the company has been based since 2018.

“The homebuying process is complex and the real estate industry as a whole has been slow to embrace technological change to address these issues. Most of the data available in the market today is too fragmented for buyers to effectively use,” said Omer Granot, President and COO of Localize, in a company statement. “We have developed products that are shifting the paradigm to empower prospective buyers and brokers to really fill in those information gaps and receive the assistance they need throughout the entire process, making us a partner from their initial search to receiving keys in hand for their new home.”

Localize is led by founder and CEO Asaf Rubin, previously with Taboola, Granot, who previously served as New York general manager and global VP of Growth for the Israeli-founded ride-sharing giant Via, and Ilan Fraiman who serves as CTO.

The company said in a statement that the newly raised funds will be directed toward further development of Localize’s existing services, R&D, sales and marketing operations, and the creation of complementary services to support the Localize ecosystem.

As part of the agreement, Chemi Peres, managing partner and co-founder of Pitango, will join Localize’s board of directors.

“Buying a home is one of the most important financial and life decisions many people make,” said Peres. “Localize enables people to find and buy the house of their dreams in a short time, using the advanced AI tools it developed. The ability to use tools that automate and digitalize this process, combined with insights that are produced using algorithms which run on massive amounts of data, makes the results quick, accurate, and fully fitted to the client’s needs.”