BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aryeo, a Boston-based proptech startup offering a platform to better manage, syndicate and utilize content in the real estate industry, announced today that it has raised $3.65 million in seed funding, led by Hyperplane VC and Amplo with participation from Contrary, Jon Oringer, founder of Shutterstock, and Bill Clerico, founder of WePay. Aryeo was started in 2019 by Branick Weix, Matt Michalski, and Brendan Quinlan, with a mission to modernize visual content in the real estate industry. The company provides software to agents, brokers and photographers, helping them create the most complete digital experience for properties. Following a successful launch, the platform hosted content for more than 1% of all U.S. home sales last year. Aryeo’s plans to use this recent round of funding, and its acceptance into the prestigious 2021 National Association of REALTORS® REACH scale-up program, to achieve wider adoption.
“Images, videos and 3D tours are essential to the real estate transaction but the process by which this property content is generated, marketed and shared is remarkably fragmented,” said Branick Weix, co-founder and CEO of Aryeo, also a former real estate photographer. “We’ve built our platform to help streamline this process and connect the dots for photographers, agents, brokerages and buyers interested in content about homes on the market.”
What started as a platform to better facilitate the relationship between photographers and agents has now broadened into an innovative platform with APIs that focus on content hosting, automated marketing generation and content syndication for agents and brokerages.
“This is our way of bringing a totally streamlined experience to each major contributor in the property marketing process,” explained Michalski, who was previously an aerial photographer and broker. “Aryeo automates the traditionally manual tasks of uploading photos, creating property websites and generating ads, which saves everyone time.”
Today, more than 30,000 agents are using the platform, along with hundreds of real estate photography companies. Notable Aryeo platform features include: business workflow software for real estate content creators; marketing automation for real estate agents; and listing feed APIs for websites, MLSs and property portals. Since launch, many tech-savvy brokerages have become early adopters of the content-streamlining technology, like Colorado-based 8z Real Estate.
“All too often agents and brokerages are reliant on another party for their own data and do not have a central system that houses all of the images, videos, 3D tours and floor plans for a property,” said Quinlan. “Many people fail to realize that by the time properties make their way to the national real estate portals, they have gone through a complex web involving inconsistent data feeds, manual inputs and disconnected parties. This results in a poor quality of media and often an incomplete representation of a home.”
Instead, Aryeo provides a central hub for agent or brokerage content then helps syndicate that content where it needs to go. “We want MLSs and portals to feature the full content set of a home and provide buyers and sellers with the best digital representation of a property,” said Weix.
The CEO also noted that the global pandemic has only strengthened the importance of images, videos, 3D tours and floor plans in the home-buying process. Providing exceptional representations of homes online has become key to property marketing success. “The agents and brokerages with the infrastructure in place to best manage and utilize visual content will emerge victorious in this new reality,” Weix explained.
Vivjan Myrto, founder and managing partner at Hyperplane Venture Capital, said: “At Hyperplane, we invest in exceptional founders of early stage growth companies who are set on solving enterprise and industry-wide challenges. Branick, Brendan and Matt saw a pressing industry need—consolidate content in a highly fragmented marketplace with multiple data sources—then created a way to universally solve this problem with the Aryeo platform.”
