Citics, a Vietnamese online real estate marketplace, has received US $1.3 million in a bridge round ahead of a Series A anticipated for next year.
Local real estate developer BHS Group and current investor Vulpes Investment Management are among the investors in the round, which is led by Vietnam Investment Group, a $50 million investment fund focused on high-growth enterprises.
The additional funds will be used to expand Citics’ present business with new services. A portion of the money will be used to improve Citics’ platforms and technologies so that it can better serve its bank partners.
The business expects to deploy the Citics Valuer mobile app and a new version of its real estate valuation platform Citics Valuation in December 2021, allowing lenders to collect property facts and preliminary valuations in just a few clicks.
According to Citics, the new version will assist banks in assessing mortgage risks and reducing execution time to less than three hours, or one-fourth of the customary period.
Citics is a data platform that supports real estate transactions such as real estate appraisal, sales-purchase, lease, and financing. It was founded in 2018 by Tran Minh Long, the former CEO of real estate broker Cen Group’s southern Vietnam area.
Nguyen Hai Ninh, the creator and former CEO of the Vietnamese coffee shop chain The Coffee House, and Pham Anh Duc, the founder of ViCare, a business that offers information about hospitals, clinics, physicians, medications, and medical symptoms, are also on the board of directors.
Citics claims to use big data and algorithms in their evaluation service, which covers real estate, moveable property, and investment projects, as well as actual property surveys.
Citics’ database now has over 12 million real estate data, over two thousand projects, and 1,4 million transaction records, according to the company’s website.
Over the last year, the firm has successfully grown into 25 provinces and cities across Vietnam, as well as forming eight new bank collaborations. Its current 17 cooperative banks include local banks like VIB, HDB, Sacombank, and Shinhanbank.
During the epidemic, the tech-savvy populace of Vietnam turned to the internet for their property purchases, propelling the proptech sector forward. According to statistics from the PropTech Vietnam Network, businesses in the sector are mushrooming to the tune of more than 100 firms, demonstrating their importance in increasing the transparency of the local real estate market. In the previous two years, Vietnamese proptechs such as Propzy, Homebase, and Rever have landed bid deals.
