Seven months after raising a $15 million Series B round—and following a number of major milestones—Boston startup Placester has raised another $27 million, a Series C round that’ll go toward accelerating its already fast-growing software business for real estate marketing. The new funding comes from returning investors New Enterprise Associates and Romulus Capital, and the Techstars Boston alum has now raised $50 million since its launch in 2011.
Placester’s core service lets real estate agents and brokers to more easily launch a customized website featuring their listings. After three years of honing and growing that service, Placester earlier this year expanded into offering CRM, marketing automation and reporting/analytics for the real estate industry.
The major impetus for the new round is to keep up the growth pace after inking a major franchise deal with Keller Williams and RE/MAX Integra, two major real estate firms, which brings Placester to 200,000 total customers—or one in five real estate agents in the U.S.
After the April round, “we had the vast majority of the money still left in the bank,” said Matt Barba, CEO and co-founder of Placester, in an interview. However, "the new financing allows us to do some really cool stuff around R&D and innovation," he said.
That’ll include more work in mobile—which still hasn’t become a major tool for real estate agents—along with more in search (making real estate search more intuitive) and doing more with creating new applications for listing data, Barba said.
After starting the year with 43 employees, Placester has now reached 105 to keep up with the expanding business and product offerings this year. The company expects to end the year with about 125 employees, Barba said. “We have no plans of slowing down,” he said. “We’re seeing a huge influx of demand from these partnerships.”
Placester took part in the 2011 session of Techstars Boston, and ranks among the top-funded alumni of the accelerator program, alongside PillPack ($62 million in funding) and Localytics ($60 million in funding).
