Property technology startup bags $1 mln investment
Property technology startup bags $1 mln investment
Citics, a Vietnamese property technology startup, has raised $1 million in a pre-series A round from international and domestic investors.
Apartment buildings and houses in District 2, Ho Chi Minh City in September 2020. Photo by VnExpress/Quynh Tran.
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Some of its investors include Singapore’s Vulpes Investment Management, and South Korea’s Nextrans and The Ventures.
It had earlier raised $700,000 from angel investors, many of whom also continued to participate in this round of funding.
By digitizing and centralizing data sources, Citics aims to create a real estate data platform to support real estate transactions, including real estate valuation, sales-purchase, lease, and mortgage.
Citics was founded in November 2018 by the former CEO of real estate broker Cen Group’s southern Vietnam region, Tran Minh Long. Long was listed in Forbes’s "30 under 30" list of entrepreneurs in 2018.
Citics’s board of directors also includes two other faces from the "30 under 30" list – Nguyen Hai Ninh, founder and former CEO of Vietnamese coffee house chain The Coffee House, and Pham Anh Duc, founder of ViCare, a startup that provides information on hospitals, clinics, doctors, drugs and symptoms of diseases.
Citics’s first application, Citics Valuations, enables banks to validate the value of a property as collateral for loans.
By using a proprietary valuation map, bankers can now check the details and preliminary values of properties with just a few clicks. The official valuation report is completed within three hours, just one fourth the time it usual takes.
The application also enables banks’ risk department to control mortgage risks related to property values and locations.
Currently, Citics has the data of more than nine million properties nationwide and has estimated values for nearly four million of them. It has provided its valuation service to 10 domestic banks.
It expected to expand its valuation service to over 30 cities and provinces, according to its CEO Tran Minh Long.
