Luxembourg-based PropTech kodehyve raises €2.6M
Fundraising to help the real estate ecosystem build and collaborate more efficiently.
After growing the team and client base at a 5x and 6x rate, respectively, throughout 2022, kodehyve raises €2.6M in private equity financing with existing and new investors to empower property developers and their stakeholders to more efficiently structure their project management, customer lifecycle management, compliance and business intelligence activities, hence helping them win in quality, efficiency and profitability.
Founded by entrepreneur Felix Hemmerling and software engineer Julien Casse, both coming from the RegTech and Fintech sectors, kodehyve is a PropTech venture focusing on property developers’ digital transformation, implementing Fintech and RegTech technologies in the real estate world.
Launched during the pandemic in early 2020 and one of the fastest growing companies in the Benelux, kodehyve effectively builds a cutting-edge property development operating system (or ERP) providing an end-to-end solution to the real estate ecosystem as a whole.
The OS powers property developers and their collaborators to plan, manage, commercialise and analyse their new construction projects more efficiently, all while providing a seamless user experience to all stakeholders involved, ensuring full compliance with applicable regulations and leveraging data.
kodehyve OS acts as a collaboration catalyst for the entire industry, reconciling a diversity of real estate professionals and their data from a fragmented and highly heterogeneous environment into one powerful platform.
The company closed €2.6M in private equity financing led by their existing and new investors. Following this round, the board of managers has been enlarged from 2 to 5 board observers, including Michel Lempicki (previously CEO at StatPro acquired by Confluence in 2019), Marc Thill and Pit Reinert, experienced entrepreneurs, administrators and investors appointed to strategically advise the founders on their mission to scale kodehyve internationally.
Founding investors continue to serve the board: Laurent Schonckert (CEO at Cactus) as a non-executive director and John Li (previously Chairman and MD at KPMG) as a board observer.
Founders’ journey and vision
From their personal experiences in real estate, the founders identified major pain points in property development and construction. The entire sector lags in digitalisation, scarred by inefficient and outdated processes and stunted by a lack of available sector-specific technologies, triggering collaboration and transparency issues.
A key differentiator from the founders’ vision is that kodehyve strives to positively impact the real estate ecosystem and not just help property developers. Addressing collaboration and transparency across the industry by connecting all stakeholders, including real estate funds, construction companies, architects, engineers, Government bodies and investors, kodehyve has found its sweet spot and USP in the PropTech market.
Funding
kodehyve aims to use the funds to fuel future product development and scale business development activities. Regarding product development, kodehyve plans to focus on its flagship and eponymous platform: kodehyve OS. The company rapidly extended its project and customer relationship management solutions into a complete operating system.
To maintain our current momentum, we will ramp up our product development efforts to further develop and automate advanced property development processes.
Our current focus lies in compliance through automated KYC and AML processes and business intelligence modules that leverage data to support informed decision-making of property developers.
Simultaneously, our team at kodehyve is working on scaling our infrastructure and stand-alone services. We are striving to automate as many of the many property development processes as possible to help unlock time and efficiency and quality gains.
Felix Hemmerling, CEO at kodehvyve
On the business development side, the venture plans to scale its activities to onboard more customers and support international growth. kodehyve aims to expand internationally and targets dynamic real estate markets such as Portugal, Switzerland and the UK.
To sustain such growth and expansion, kodehyve will strengthen its talent pool to ensure the brightest team members are around.
Venture evolution
Since their first seed round of €1M was announced in 2021 and highlighted in June’s hottest European venture deals by Sifted, kodehyve has substantially evolved:
The company has experienced an x6 growth in clients and has evolved its main product. In one year, kodehyve OS has become a complete operating system dedicated to property development, including customer lifecycle management, project management, financial management, business intelligence and compliance modules. That way, the solution solves most use cases in the industry.
Furthermore, kodehyve also launched a new standalone e-signature platform dedicated to all real estate professionals: kodehvye sign. The latter was launched under the brand lux-sign in collaboration with the Luxembourg Chamber of Real Estate, , LuxTrust and AWS for the local Luxembourg market.
On the human capital side, the team has grown 5x since the last raise to reach more than 16 members, including Amazon and AWS veterans and UCLA and SciencesPo Alumni.
Led by its development, the company reinforced its data and engineering team to support product development and created a first growth team with business development, marketing and customer success roles to reinforce and support its growth. kodehyve also extended their leadership team and appointed Véronique Ziliotto as Head Of Product, directly coming from AWS.
Within its development and international ambitions, the venture recently refreshed its brand image and visual universe to better reflect the established company that it is today, accurately describing what kodehyve is and what its team stands for.
This new visual universe was deployed in September through the launch of the new website and the release of a new brand video.