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Propify, a startup that makes a unified application programming interface (API) for property management software, announced Tuesday that it has closed a $3.3 million seed round.
The Boston-based company secured the funding from Fifth Wall, Prudence, Y Combinator, RXR, PropTech Angel Group and HubSpot co-founder Dharmesh Shah, among others. The company said the funds from the round will be used to further build out its product and grow its engineering team.
Propify’s product enables engineers to launch integrations in days rather than months, reducing development and ongoing maintenance costs, according to the company. It combines a modern API, documentation, and scalable infrastructure to support proptech clients.
Many proptech companies are attempting to address property managers’ multiple pain points, but Propify claims its API is unique.
“APIs are effectively designed to move data from one system to another,” said Remen Okoruwa, CEO and co-founder at Propify. “We actually tackle a similar but arguably more challenging problem. We are helping tech companies that serve the property management industry to allow their technology to integrate and move data between their system and multiple property management softwares.
“Why is that so hard? Because the property manager software industry is pretty fragmented. You have players like RealPage, Entrata, Yardi and MRI Software — there’s a long list of software that these companies are attempting to build integrations into in the absence of what we provide with our technology. These companies have to build and maintain multiple separate integration. Our unified API effectively serves as a universal translator, allowing our clients to build a single integration into our system that will then be able to move data back and forth between all of those property management software APIs that we connect to.”
For Fifth Wall, the Los Angeles-based proptech venture capital firm, Propify was an opportunity to invest in what Fifth Wall sees as a unified API solution for property managers and proptech software companies attempting to integrate with each other.
“We actually see the challenges on both sides of the equation, where on one side you have real estate owners that sometimes have multiple property management software systems installed across their assets — and those are our LPs,” said Dan Wenhold, partner and co-head of real estate tech investment at Fifth Wall. “And, then, on the other side of the equation, you have upstart startup software technology companies that are serving real estate owners and needing to connect into property management software systems or sit alongside them.
“They’re building apps essentially that can do everything from rent collection to leasing, to renter retention, other types of payments, processing software, and all the things that have to build integrations,” Wenhold added. “Similarly, on the LP side, there needs to be resources and costs associated with building integrations from the owner side as well. Propify solves that and acts as the connective tissue between many of the apps that are disrupting the property management space. So we got really excited that this was a company that not only could help our LPs, but could also help existing companies in our portfolio that we’ve also invested in already.”
Propify pivoted out of another startup, Rentdrop, which was a rent payment application, in fall 2022. “It was a pivot that was born from a pain that we directly experienced,” Okoruwa said. “We were unable to successfully sell property managers to use our rent payment app, because we never actually were able to get those integrations done.”
The current startup has six full-time staff serving clients across the U.S., Canada and Israel, with an eye toward growing geographically and across real estate sectors, said Okoruwa. “We’re in the process of exploring ways that our integration and data management tools can more directly benefit multifamily property owners and managers. So we have some product stuff that’s going to be getting announced in the coming months.”
Philip Russo can be reached at prusso@commercialobserver.com.
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