kodehyve Raises €1 Million to Accelerate the Digitalisation of Real Estate Processes in Europe

‍Luxembourg-based PropTech kodehyve announces the closing of its €1 Million seed financing round with strategic investors from Luxembourg and Singapore. With the capital raised, kodehyve aims to further develop its real estate collaboration tool and expand into new European markets.

by Felix Hemmerling | June 8, 2021

Launched in early 2020, the kodehyve team has identified major process-related pain-points in the real estate market as well as a strongly growing demand for digitalisation by real estate players in Luxembourg and abroad. Real estate professionals increasingly aim to build a solid digital foundation for their businesses to optimise their processes, enhance user experiences and differentiate themselves. Overall, the real estate market offers a lot of untapped potential for digital innovation while clearly showing strong signs of shifting investor preferences: Millennials and Gen Z are entering the market, being “digital-first” generations. This new type of customers demands direct access to information and powerful digital experiences. The identification of the latter as well as the founders’ vision of creating a more efficient real estate ecosystem and thereby contributing to solving some aspects of the ever-increasing housing problems were among the main factors leading to the launch of kodehyve in May last year.

A powerful collaboration tool tailored to the real estate market

By largely replacing heterogeneous tools, inefficient workflows and outdated user experiences, kodehyve effectively is a B2B collaboration software helping real estate developers, agencies and funds to more efficiently plan, manage and analyse their construction and commercialisation projects. Through the careful selection of powerful in-house modules as well as third-party APIs, kodehyve specifically enables real estate professionals to work better and provide superior user experiences within the three areas of project management, customer relationship management as well as financial and data analysis. Providing a high-quality white-labelled platform in the customers’ look-and-feel, features available include task and deadline management, information and document exchange flows, customer onboarding, e-signatures, KYC and AML checks, billing, live chat, budgeting, financial analysis and more. Besides better collaboration between stakeholders and considerable increases in productivity, kodehyve enables real estate players to achieve their ESG ambitions by going 100% digital and thereby reducing their carbon footprint.

“We live in the year 2021 and real estate still largely relies on outdated processes. From lengthy email exchanges to physical mail and phone calls, the real estate market is lagging at least 5 to 10 years behind the financial industry when it comes to digitalisation and the general use of powerful solutions. Our vision is to make the real estate market 100% digital, and we know it is possible.”
Julien Casse, Co-Founder & CTO of kodehyve

‍Private equity seed investment and track record

Since launching the technology startup, kodehyve has gone from pre-product and pre-revenue to post-product and post-revenue — fully bootstrapped without taking on external investments or debt. Based on the product validation in 2020 and the founders’ vision of growing an internationally scalable tool, kodehyve decided to raise capital so as to accelerate the evolution of their product and scale operations in the main real estate hubs in Europe, e.g. Munich, Berlin, Zurich, and Geneva. Today, the team consists of seven software engineers and product specialists — and like the founders, the team members mainly have a FinTech and RegTech background. Kodehyve will use the raised capital to grow its team to a size of 12 in the coming year and accelerate its international sales efforts. The €1 Million private equity round was raised from a group of experienced investors in Luxembourg and Singapore: Laurent Schonckert (CEO of Cactus), Frank Veyder (former investor and COO at Slightly Mad Studios), John Li (former Managing Partner and Chairman at KPMG), Eric van de Kerkhove (former Partner at Deloitte), Benoit Schaus (former Partner at Deloitte), Bruno Beernaerts (former Managing Director at Capita and Partner at Deloitte), as well as PE and real estate investors Robert Godart and Charles Sunnen.

“We are extremely proud to have such a valuable team of experienced investors on board — all of which know the real estate industry very well and have the necessary know-how and network to help us accelerate our activities. Learning a lot from our customers, it was important for us to stay independent in this first private equity round and not to raise funds with real estate organisations.”
Felix Hemmerling, Co-Founder & CEO of kodehyve

Besides closing its €1 Million seed round, kodehyve is also one of the 15 startups selected for the 2021 “Fit4Start” acceleration programme hosted by LuxInnovation and the Luxembourg Ministry of Economy. The team is participating in “Fit4Start” to further develop its business, while also adding another potential €150k in non-equity funding as part of the programme.