Why Toba invested in Luxury Presence
Yesterday Luxury Presence announced their $5.4M Series A funding led by Switch Ventures, with Toba participating meaningfully in the round. Switch’s GP Paul Arnold is doubling down after previously leading the prior $2.1M Seed round of investment into the company.
We first got to know Luxury Presence and its founder/CEO Malte Kramer at the beginning of October and quickly grew excited about the opportunity to work together in growing the business. Though we often prefer to build a relationship with a founding team over a more extended time period, in this case we hustled hard to sneak into the round before we missed our shot.
Our team is drawn to the Luxury Presence business for several reasons, which I'll enumerate below.
First is Toba's experience with both real estate software technologies & verticalized marketing platforms such as our portfolio company PatientPop. Our hunch was that if a new entrant into the real estate marketing space were to really take off, they had to take precisely the approach as Luxury Presence: Beginning with a best-in-class website solution with luxury/prestige branding for top agents, and layering in additional value-added features and modules over time. Hearing the Luxury Presence pitch had us immediately interested.
Our second reason was the quality of the team from top to bottom. Not only does Malte embody all of the characteristics that our fund seeks in a founding CEO, but the company’s employees & executives are uniformly bright, curious, engaged, professional, and driven. Spending time with them in their Santa Monica headquarters strongly helped to solidify our decision.
The third and final rationale for our investment was the business’s fundamentals. Yes, growth trajectory -- but also cash flows, margins, net retention, growth to burn... every metric you’d want to see was best-in-class for a company at this size and stage. And with plenty of reasons to expect they will only improve over time.
We think Luxury Presence has a chance to be a massive winner in the real estate technology space, and we can't wait to help them achieve their potential.
If anybody reading this is looking for job opportunities in high-growth SaaS businesses on the west side of LA, definitely check out Luxury Presence's careers page. They're hiring for a long list of roles in sales, client services, engineering, design, and finance.
And if you know any real estate agents who are looking to improve their online branding, discoverability, lead generation, and social media presence -- and want to join 18 out of the Top 100 WSJ real estate agents who use Luxury Presence -- please direct them towards the product tour.
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