Extate Raises Venture Funding
Press Release
Top investors back property search engine Extate.com
London, 29 August 2007: Extate.com (“Extate”), the Web search engine whose innovative technology provides an alternative to directory-based property search - which is free and effortless for estate agents, and easier and more transparent for house hunters - has received key financial backing from a group of venture capital investors who have supported some of the most successful media and technology companies to emerge in the past decade.
BytePlay, the parent company of Extate, has received equity funding from The Accelerator Group (“TAG”) and Arts Alliance, backers of both lastminute.com and online DVD distributor LOVEFiLM, and from Samos Investments, which funded the online betting exchange Betfair. Joining BytePlay’s co-founders Artemi Krymski and Douglas de Jager on the company’s board are Robin Klein, Chairman of TAG, and Adam Valkin, a partner at Arts Alliance and a former director of propertyfinder.
Extate uses a ‘Google-type’ approach to real estate search, using ‘robots’ to search widely for estate agency listings and then extracting and sorting (or ’parsing’) key information and producing easy-to-read summaries that link directly through to estate agents’ original listings. Proprietary ‘machine learning’ technology developed by BytePlay automatically works out how to extract the most relevant information from a property listing, for example the full address or the price, thereby ensuring that users are only directed to the most relevant properties. This technology has proved crucial to the accuracy of Extate’s search capabilities and has been an important driver of its rapid expansion.
The Web-based property search market is currently dominated by traditional directory platforms, such as Primelocation, Rightmove and propertyfinder, which require estate agents not only to organise their own data feeds, but also charge a listing fee. The market has also seen the recent emergence of several GoogleMap ‘mashup’ Websites which search over the top of the directories, channelling users to the most relevant one.
Extate offers a real alternative for both estate agents and customers. For estate agents it provides a free, effortless marketing platform which, unlike the traditional model, links customers directly to the estate agents’ original listings. This in turn benefits customers by providing them with the easiest and most transparent way to find properties on the internet.
Extate also incorporates several unique usability features aimed at improving user experience. It is the first site to introduce dynamically generated heat maps, which show price variations from area to area, while other features include user-generated flash videos, tagging of properties and intelligent one-box search.
Extate currently indexes 418,000 UK real estate listings directly from the Websites of more than 5,000 agents’ offices and is now second only to Rightmove in terms of its UK coverage. In August 2007 the company was picked out by The Guardian newspaper as one of its Top 10 dotcoms to watch.
Artemi Krymski, co-founder of BytePlay who was recently short-listed by Business Week as one of Europe’s Young Entrepreneurs of the Year, commented: “This investment is a key milestone which will enable us to take the company through to the next stage in its development. Extate is the first application of the generic search technologies we are developing at BytePlay and in addition to financing the growth of Extate.com, this funding will enable us to explore other potentially interesting applications of our technology.”
Adam Valkin from Arts Alliance added, “Douglas and Artemi are two talented and dynamic young entrepreneurs and we have been impressed by how much they have achieved in such a short period of time, creating the most estate-agent and user friendly sites in the UK and South Africa and gaining excellent market penetration. They’ve turned the traditional property search model on its head and we look forward to working closely with them to help grow the business to its full potential.”
Ends
For further information, please contact:
Douglas de Jager, extate.com, +44 (0)7790 663157, d [at] extate.com
Media enquiries
Annabel O’Connor / Peter Curtain, Capital MS&L, +44 (0)20 7307 5330
Annabel.oconnor [at] capitalmsl.com / peter.curtain [at] capitalmsl.com
Notes to editors
About BytePlay
BytePlay is a London-based search technology company. It was founded in May 2006 by Artemi Krymski and Douglas de Jager, two young alumni of Europe’s leading technology university, Imperial College London. The company now comprises six Imperial College alumni. BytePlay focuses on the development of parsing technologies which characterise typed or vertical search. The company’s first consumer-facing product is real estate search engine, Extate.com.
About The Accelerator Group
The Accelerator Group (TAG) works with entrepreneurs and world-class venture firms to create and build fast-growing Internet services and e-commerce businesses. It has a portfolio of over twenty companies including Agent Provocateur, LoveFilm, Star Doll, Moo, Digivate and GlassesDirect.
About Arts Alliance
Arts Alliance is a venture capital organisation that supports high growth companies in Europe with a particular focus on technology-enabled services. Key areas of interest include media and entertainment, mobile services, retail and logistics, marketing services, outsourcing and energy. Arts Alliance has invested in over 40 companies since 1996, including LastMinute, LOVEFiLM and propertyfinder.
About Samos Investments
Samos Investments is an early to mid-stage venture capital investor in high growth European businesses. Samos seeks to make investments across a variety of sectors including financial services, retail, industrial/clean-technology and ecommerce. The fund currently has a portfolio of over 15 companies including Betfair, Ocado, Global Trader, ETV Capital and PKR.