From MVP to Series C: Casavo’s technological growth through the lens of an early joiner

It took Casavo around 3.5 years to achieve this stage of growth

What a ride.

When I joined Casavo and its marketing team back in January 2018, the company was working on what was essentially a gigantic MVP. At that time, Casavo had already received a pre-seed round and was a few months away from closing its seed round. The sums on the table were nowhere close (in fact, much higher) to the Italian average for that stage of growth, however, Casavo was still just a gigantic MVP.

This was mainly connected to Casavo’s business model. If your business is in fintech, you probably have the opportunity to get to a hundred or even a thousand transactions very fast and this enables quick iterations and testing. But if your business model revolves around the acquisition and sale of real estate properties and, especially if you are starting from scratch, it’s an entirely different matter. It can take months or even years to achieve 100 transactions and to feel that building dedicated technology is worth the effort because you need the data points and market insights that only time can provide. Giorgio, our CEO, framed it very clearly by saying that we were penniless.

Back then, Casavo relied on a handful of willing young people who spent their days looking for opportunities on the market, talking to brokers, and establishing relationships, but above all trying to make something valuable out of the few (considering the business) resources at their disposal. It was right after I joined the company that our first piece of technology was brought to market.

Fiat AVM

Up until this point, customers could essentially navigate our website and request an offer from us for their property. To make it clear: all we had was a form with a nice value proposition to buy the house within 30 days. At the beginning of 2018, we published the first tool in Italy for real-time, no-obligation online valuations of residential properties. We were not 100% able to provide the service on our own and we relied on the support of external parties. Today our valuations are managed 100% with proprietary technologies, but that’s how we started.

Right after that, our investment team was not able to manage the database of RE assets and customer data with rudimentary solutions anymore, and the first tool for internal operations was put into place: a simple interface that allowed my colleagues to store documents and information without the risk of software crashes. It was a tactical solution for a very urgent need. In case you are surprised, remember that we started with almost no money.

From PROPtech to PROPTECH

It was at the beginning of 2020, following our series B round, some errors, and an internal reorganization, that things finally started to change. At that time, the number of people dedicated to the development of technological products was between 5 and 10 (depending on how you count freelancers and leavers). Francesco, our CTO, joined us during those days and I personally took the role of CPO. Now, in hindsight, I realize it was Giorgio’s (and the management’s) declaration of how serious everyone was about wanting to shift the balance from prop to tech, creating a perfect harmony between the two.

Q1 2021

During the past 15 months of extremely hard work, we have accomplished so much:

• We have released a mobile app for remote visits, basically, the first tool in Europe that enables you to receive an offer on your property without ever having to open the door. It was an MVP at first, but now we have refactored it and we are working on incremental improvements that we believe will be key for house-sellers in Italy and Spain;
• Right after the pandemic began and the consequent lockdowns in Europe, we committed to delivering a real estate listings platform for residential properties that would be free of charge for brokers and that would focus on a superior UX and quality of the listings. We decided it had to be available within 2 months, and we made it happen. Now we have more than 2,600 listings available in the cities we serve as an iBuyer and a lead conversion rate that can be compared to that of established players (although on smaller volumes);
• Connected to the point above, we also released Doris, our platform for brokers. For the first time ever in Europe, we allowed professionals to not only publish a listing but also to request an instant offer from an industrial player such as Casavo;
• We released a set of tools to support the capital-intensive aspects of our business that we named “Corporate Finance Suite”: the enabler of our money-borrowing mechanisms;
• We developed a task-centric and decision-centric tool to scale our internal operations and enable the management of hundreds of transactions, ensuring data integrity and the automation of repetitive tasks, together with machine-learning-driven support to evaluate investments;
• We acquired Realisti.co, which brought to the table the technology behind the leading provider of virtual tours for real estate in Southern Europe;
• The team has grown from a handful of people to more than 50. Spoiler: if you haven’t been through it, hypergrowth is hard! We had to introduce a new way of working in our company that was based on Large-Scale Scrum, the principles of flat organizations, and a lot of effort to create the right corporate culture. Our goal is to make Casavo a fractal company.

Series C: what lies ahead?

The recent injection of capital and trust led by Exor will boost our roadmap for 2021 and 2022, which is based on 3 main drivers:

1. Exponential scalability of our transactions with an additional focus on task-centric and decision-centric tools in order to make it easier for our colleagues to manage, monitor, and execute the basic activities that fuel Casavo’s top line;
2. Support the mission to change the way Europeans sell, live, and buy homes, penetrating the Spanish market like what we are doing in Italy, boosting the provision of services that will allow Casavo to serve home-sellers and home-buyers through more of the customer journey;
3. Simplification of the customer experience based on our vision of “freedom from complexity”, with our customers being:

• Sellers
• Buyers
• Brokers

To summarize, we will keep following the path for Casavo to become one of the leading forces acting on the digitalization of the home-selling and home-buying process, to the greater benefit of all the players involved. We truly believe that through a more transparent, comprehensible, and accessible market we will be able to make the life of Europeans at least a little better, supporting them during one of the most complicated and emotionally-intense events of their lives.

Above all, this funding round means one thing: we can wake up in the morning knowing that we have just started our journey and that we must go forward with enthusiasm and passion.

It’s always day 1.