Less than one year after its launch, a Cincinnati real estate-focused startup has nearly doubled its capital stack as it plots its first expansion outside the region.
Ocusell, an 11-month-old proptech startup that aims to simplify the residential real estate listing process, has raised $1 million in new capital. That infusion pushes its funding total to just under $2 million and increases its valuation to $8 million.
Co-founders Alex Taylor and Hayden Rieveschl told me they opted to raise through private investors versus through more traditional venture capital firms, although there was interest.
That allowed for more favorable terms — and a higher valuation.
The new capital will allow Ocusell to make a hiring push, Taylor said. It also means the company can plot an expansion to new markets and continue to build out its product. He declined to name the specific investors but said they are heavily involved in the real estate space.
“We’ve had so many conversations with VCs, but they tend to focus on revenue versus market potential,” Taylor said. “Our investors are investing in the product, not just our P&L (profile and loss statement), because they’re in the industry and know the potential of something like this.”
Taylor, one of the ground-floor employees at Dotloop, a real estate tech startup that celebrated one of the city’s most notable exits when it sold to Zillow for $108 million in 2015, and Rieveschl, a former hedge fund manager, founded Ocusell to expedite the residential real estate listing process — digitizing and streamlining a system they call “archaic and disconnected.”
Ocusell’s platform allows agents to generate, manage and integrate listings and publish directly to the Multiple Listing Service (MLS) in just a few clicks. On the Ocusell platform, agents can organize and store property listings, assets and people, all in one place; enhance listings; and schedule and publish social media content across multiple channels with access to analytics.
Largely, the company has been selling directly to agents, real estate teams and brokers. That’s still a focus. But Ocusell is having higher-level discussions with major individual listing services.
There are around 600 MLS’s across the country. Taylor said the company could license its product to each organization, where the MLS would pay for and distribute the product directly to its collection of agents. Or Ocusell could do a revenue share.
That shift is another credit to its private investor team. That core group has helped the company expand its network via new connections.
“We think that route is more advantageous, and more cost effective for us, rather than going after individual members,” Rieveschl said. “Cincinnati has around 2,000 agents, but in some of these other markets (where we want to grow), that number is 10X.”
Currently, the company has six employees. Taylor said he hopes to make at least three strategic director-level hires spanning sales/business development, product and customer experience roles.
As its team has grown, Ocusell has taken up a larger footprint in the historic Mohawk building, located in Cincinnati’s West End, where Taylor operates his other businesses, Oval Room Group, a visual media real estate startup, and Brighton CoWorx, a coworking and incubator space.
Currently, the firm is working with a handful of brokers and roughly 500 real estate agents in Cincinnati, and it just opened up in Northern Kentucky.
The raise will fuel Ocusell’s planned expansion outside Greater Cincinnati for the first time. Taylor declined to name specific cities but said they’re initially targeting the West Coast.
“We want to aggressively grow through this so-called recession,” he said. “Especially with the way interest rates are affecting the housing market, you’re going to see a culling of agents who are more part time, or who are only doing a couple transactions a year. Those who are serious will expand through this down time, and they need a tool to make themselves more efficient.”
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