L.D. Salmanson
Co-founder and CEO at Cherre
Chief technology officers at large funds are swimming in data and pining for a way to use it to generate alpha.
“How do they replicate more of the good and less of the bad, and bring rigor to that process?” said Cherre’s L.D. Salmanson.
Since Cherre came on the scene in 2016, it’s been remarkably successful at convincing the market that “moneyball for real estate” is something you can buy, and that it’s increasingly within reach for firms that can’t invest heavily on an in-house technical team.
Salmanson and co-founder Ben Hizak spent much of the past seven years building a network of third-party data vendors who didn’t exactly jump at the opportunity to partner with a proptech startup, even if it meant potentially realizing a higher value on their data sets.
“We had to convince the most risk-averse clients in the world to give us access to their most important data. This was really, really challenging,” Salmanson said.
Today, Cherre’s data platform offers what it calls a “single source of truth” for companies looking to create predictive analytics models to better understand where they outperform their peers — without reinventing the wheel. A sophisticated technical team can contextualize data sets exponentially faster, but “you have to take them one step further and deliver that insight,” Salmanson said.
The hype around AI has certainly been fortuitous for Cherre.
“There are a lot of people saying, ‘That’s really cool, I’m excited. I have no idea what to do. Just give me something on a platter to start moving forward,’ ” Salmanson said.
He cautioned against anyone purporting to offer AI magic beans. Insight is possible only when all your data has been connected, Salmanson said.
Cherre closed a $50 million funding round in 2021, and, amid all the hubbub, its net dollar retention ratio remains north of 125 percent — a very encouraging figure, Salmanson said.
