Camber Creek Leads $45M Seed Funding for SERHANT.Technologies

Ryan SERHANT has gone from “Million Dollar Listing” to multimillion-dollar-funded proptech entrepreneur.

Serhant’s eponymous Serhant.Technologies announced Monday that is has raised $45 million in an equity funding seed round, led by proptech venture capital firm Camber Creek.  Left Lane Capital, a venture and growth equity firm known for investing in consumer and internet technology companies, also participated in the round.

The Manhattan-based Serhant. Technologies is the holding company for wholly owned subsidiaries Serhant., a real estate brokerage; SellIt.com; Serhant. Studios; and automated workflow software S.mple.

Serhant. Technologies will use the funding to further develop its AI-powered S.mple as well as to fuel and scale its brokerage, educational technology, and content creation and production services.

Having been a reality TV star on Bravo‘s series “Million Dollar Listing New York” for nine seasons, as well as on its spinoff “Sell It Like Serhant,” his-name-is-everywhere Serhant is also on Netflix’s reality show, “Owning Manhattan.”

Along with such endeavors, Serhant managed to “boot-strap” Serhant. Technologies to a point of growth where having outside funding became attractive to him for the first time, he said.

“We are a cloud-based real estate brokerage that’s growing up and down the East Coast,” said Serhant. “We’re opening up in a new market about every 14 days. At this point, we have SellIt.com which is a very large [direct-to-consumer] and [business-to-business] sales training business for the next generation of salespeople. We have a production studio for real estate, which is kind of redefining how we are generating leads through content-to-commerce in a way that’s never been done for real estate before. And then we have S.mple, which is our AI product to enable us to redefine the way sales people work, starting with real estate.”

The company has expanded rapidly into 128 countries through SellIt.com, Serhant said. “All of the markets that we’ve expanded to, we’ve expanded through SellIt. And, so, our margins are probably the best in the business, considering our competition buys revenue almost dollar for dollar.”

“This content-to-commerce approach was attractive to investors,” said Jeffrey Berman, general partner at Camber Creek. “By seamlessly integrating cutting-edge technology with top-tier real estate expertise, Serhant. has created a powerful flywheel effect, driving exponential growth and engagement across their platform. His passion and vision for disrupting the industry, coupled with his commitment to leveraging technology in innovative ways, made it clear that Serhant. is destined to redefine the future of real estate.”

As if Serhant’s presence in residential real estate wasn’t enough, his brokerage has also ventured into New York City commercial real estate sales, Serhant said. “We are predominantly residential, our TV shows are residential, but we now have a commercial division and are doing more and more commercial selling. In New York City, we’re retained right now to sell 548 West 22nd Street for Atlas Capital, and I think that’s $60 million, and we’re selling 281 Park Avenue South for RFR. That’s a nine-figure sale.”

As for the future of AI in real estate sales, Serhant was emphatic in his views on the relationship between technology and the salesperson.

“I think that technology, especially software, can be easily replaceable and is only as good as the people who use it,” he said. “I think we’ve spent the last 20 years watching market makers be technologically enabled to find success and now we’re looking at market makers who are going to be AI empowered. I don’t see another firm who’s using AI the way we are. I see a lot of companies creating chatbots and doing nice, pretty wraps, but just adding another widget or another screen to an already very busy suite of services for salespeople to use.

“The big difference here is that I am a salesperson, and I understand where salespeople come from and what the future of selling looks like. That’s what we do, and I think that’s why we had a lot of investor interest.”

Philip Russo can be reached at prusso@commercialobserver.com.