SCV invests in $3.55 million Seed round raised by Rubik to simplify single family rental investing for institutional investors. The funds will be used to grow the company’s transactional volume by further building out its platform and expanding the team.
SCV invests in a $3.55M Seed Round alongside lead investor Ulu Ventures. AAF Management, ERA’s Remarkable Ventures Fund, Green Egg Ventures and Greg Waldorf, former board member at Trulia and Zillow, also participate in the round.
Rubik was founded by Amar Sehic, Krenar Roka and Tommaso Montagni, who saw firsthand the massive appetite of US institutional investors for the nascent asset class through their work building market analysis and sourcing tools for various funds in the space. Rubik’s Real Estate Platform was created to address the identifyed bottlenecks unique to investors trying to allocate institutional capital in SFR. The platform uses a data-driven approach to provide inventory for investors in a shifting, supply-starved real estate market. With founders from three different countries, Rubik’s team is spread across the Balkans and the US, with the entire development team based in Kosovo.
Today’s institutional investors rely on fragmented networks of local brokers and wholesalers for dealflow, resulting in a lack of transparency and high friction for transactions. Rubik solves this problem by leveraging data science to uncover and aggregate proprietary inventory. Harvesting and analyzing data across entire markets, Rubik’s technology is able to identify homes that match the specific buying criteria of each buyer and which are not currently on the market. It brings these off-market homes onto Rubik’s marketplace, allowing institutional investors to then purchase the assets through a streamlined manner and with full data transparency. Allowing for a fully digitized acquisition process, Rubik provides a plug and play acquisition platform for institutional buyers.
Twenty of the largest SFR buyers in the USA use Rubik
Since launching the marketplace in 2021, Rubik has transacted more than $12M of single family homes. What is more, 20 of the largest SFR buyers in the USA as its customers. With the market developments in the past few months, demand from traditional home buyers has started to cool and growth in prices is expected to slow. This is creating new opportunities for larger buyers already eager to acquire more homes.
As says Amar Sehic, Rubik’s CEO and co-founder: “We’re looking at a once-in-20-year opportunity in front of us here. Last time when we were in this part of the cycle, Invitation Homes was created and brought this asset class to life. With the capital and partners we’ve brought on-board, we’re well positioned to take advantage of the coming real estate market shifts and leverage our early market lead in the space to become the go-to investment platform for institutional single family investors.”
“SCV’s investment focus is on companies that digitize and transform the traditional industries, and Rubik is a perfect example of this,” says Tatjana Zabasu Mikuž, Co-founder and Managing Partner at South Central Ventures. “We have known the founding team for some time and were impressed by their ability to identify the market need and develop a solution that truly transforms the deal sourcing and property acquisition for institutional buyers. So far, the company has been able to consistently find and provide proprietary investment opportunities, and we firmly believe this new investment will help them expand faster.”
As said Klint Corver, Co-founder and Managing Director at Ulu Ventures: Rubik brings a modern technology solution to an industry that has so far relied mostly on traditional boots-on-ground for deal sourcing and inventory growth. Their platform can help reduce transaction friction, better match supply and demand as well as provide liquidity for homeowners looking to exit.”
Rubik plans to use the funds to grow its transactional volume across current markets by further building out its core data & analytics platform and expanding the engineering, sales and marketing teams.
About Rubik
Rubik allows investors to build institutional grade single family portfolios with a couple of clicks. The company uses data science and machine learning to identify and acquire proprietary investment opportunities for REITs, Hedge Funds and Family Offices who are looking to build Single Family Rental (SFR) portfolios of hundreds of homes. Rubik provides dozens of institutional buyers with a transparent, scalable, plug and play acquisitions platform while providing liquidity to local rental home investors.