Flow Living Raises $4.5M in pre-Series A Funding —The Biggest Investment in African Proptech History

South African proptech firm Flow Living has secured a record-breaking pre-Series A investment round worth an estimated R78 million ($4.5M).

The startup will use the funds to expand its social media-driven real estate marketing platform into new territories, with co-founder Gil Sperling saying Flow Living is in talks with portals in up to 10 countries.

The round was led by Futuregrowth Asset Management with $2M, followed by Endeavour Harvest Fund and serial entrepreneur & investor Steven Heilbron. Pre-invested firms Kalon Venture Partners, Vunani Fintech Fund and Buffet Investments also increased their stake in the company.

Flow is a B2B real estate marketing platform that automatically creates ads from listings and automatically redirects them towards target audiences on platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Google. The company has solutions for agencies, portals, developers.

Gil Sperling, co-CEO at Flow Living, said:

"The global property industry faces a massive fragmentation challenge, with millions of agents and thousands of property portals fighting to reach buyers and sellers on digital channels - and they haven’t been able to do so in the way many other verticals have.

"Our aim has always been to enable property industry growth, helping connect buyers and sellers with agents and portals on the platforms where they spend most of their time – on social media. The industry desperately needs to be brought into the 21 st century – and the Flow platform and its APIs enable portals to offer fully-automated off-site advertising on amongst others, social media and digital out-of-home boards at scale, to enable agents and portals to easily target and connect with buyers and sellers, using proven best-practice tools."

Daniel Levy, co-CEO at Flow Living, said:

"Digital advertising is set to grow to $448 billion in 2023, with social media advertising comprising a third of that value.

"Though this is happening across verticals, it’s currently impossible for the property industry to capitalise because of its fragmented nature. Flow enables portals, agents and CRMs to align with the trend and claim their part in this exponential growth.

"We’ve proven the case in South Africa with partners including Prop Data, RE/MAX, Seeff, eXp South Africa and RealNet, as well as in Australia with AgentBox, leading agency groups and a major portal going live in March. We’re also well on our way to establishing distribution deals in the United Kingdom and are already in discussions with partners in countries in Europe and North & South America."