Cherre Picks Up $30M Series C Funding

Wrangling data is a huge ongoing challenge in real estate, but proptech data management platform Cherre has secured $30 million in a Series C funding round to further attack the issue, Commercial Observer can first report.

HighSage Ventures, a capital-backed investment firm, led the round. Additional participants in the round included real estate enterprise investors Nuveen Real Estate, RXR Arden Digital Ventures and certain principals at TA Realty, as well as current investors Trustbridge Partners, Glilot Capital Partners, Intel Capital and Carthona Capital.

The latest funding will be used primarily to expand Cherre’s five-person sales team and its marketing group to meet growing client demand, said L.D. Salmanson, CEO and co-founder of Cherre. The company has about 100 full-time employees and plans to hire at least 20 more, he added. 

“We want to invest in sales,” Salmanson said. “People think we have some massive sales team, but it’s tiny. So we want to actually have a significantly larger sales and marketing team.”

Cherre has already invested significantly in its product side, he added. “Our core products, basically our connectors and data submission portal (DSP), are doing really well. Those are two different ways of getting data into a centralized data warehouse and then out to all the regular connections that people have.”

Founded in 2016, the Manhattan-based company aims to deliver centralized real estate data to clients faster, but without losing accuracy, said Salmanson.

“We’re focused a lot on the quality of data,” he said. “Not surprisingly, our clients have a very low tolerance for risk and mistakes. We can’t fix the entire market, but if we can help give a little more observability, a little more insight into the quality of the data going through the pipelines from the source, then you’re really adding some quality to that result at the end. So now a business user at the end uses that data to contrast where it came from. They don’t have to question the validity of that data or the risk type of model.”

Along with improving Cherre’s technology delivery service through its DSP, Salmanson sees the market coming around to the necessity of in-house data cleaning and accessibility to all those working in a real estate organization.

“I think we deserve some credit,” said Salmanson. “That’s not supposed to sound cocky, but I really believe we deserve at least some credit in that we brought the market to a place that maybe a few years ago they didn’t think about data the way they do today. I think about all the data vendors that we’ve convinced to sell data as a data feed and not as an application, or things like that. Or how many big application vendors we’ve convinced to start offering ways to have their data be extracted from those systems with ease. So the entire market right now is a lot more ready and excited to hear the Cherre message, which is, ‘Oh, wow! I get all my data in one place.’”

The latest funding comes on the heels of Monday’s announcement that Cherre is expanding its strategic partnership with Nuveen Real Estate, one of the largest real estate investment managers in the world with $147 billion in assets under management.

“Cherre is well on its way to becoming the foundational data platform for the real estate industry,” HighSage Ventures investor Nicholas Appelo said in a statement. “HighSage is thrilled to back L.D., an exceptional visionary leader, and his world-class team. This round positions Cherre to capitalize on the vast opportunity to provide real estate investors, lenders and service providers with data intelligence capabilities that improve underwriting processes and streamline operations.”

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