The value of a startup can also be measured by the ‘quality’ of its early investors. Less than three years after its launch, Kodehyve has convinced a small group of twenty investors, 11 new and 6 existing ones, to provide an additional €2.6m, on top of the first €1m raised in mid-2021.

The two founders, Félix Hemmerling and Julien Casse, will each retain a third of the shares in their proptech company, which is developing an operating system for the real estate sector, and they have secured the support of most of their original investors. These include , the director of the Cactus group, who put €300,000 back into the venture to maintain a stake of more than 5% as the startup’s third investor, and John Li, former chairman and managing director of KPMG (+€200,000).

But they also managed to attract newcomers, such as the vice president of Luxempart, Jacquot Schwertzer, via his holding company Acticap (€250,000), the head of the Rives de Clausen, Serge Libens via Altmunster Investment (€200,000), Michel Lempicki, ex-CEO of StatPro, acquired by Confluence in 2019 (€130,000), Pit Reinert, well known in the real estate world (€150,000) and Ben Rieth, partner in the new Wagmi fund for the worlds of tomorrow (€400,000).

Five board observers

The board of directors has been increased from two to five ‘board observers’, including Lempicki, Marc Thill and Reinert, alongside the founding investors Schonckert, non-executive director, and John Li.

With Kodehyve OS, which will be able to go much further than the project management and customer relationship management solution it originally envisioned, the proptech wants to connect “all stakeholders, including real estate funds, construction companies as well as architects, engineers, government agencies and investors [and cover] collaboration and transparency aspects.”

Automation and European expansion

"We are currently focusing on compliance aspects, including through KYC and AML process automation, as well as business intelligence modules that leverage data to help real estate developers make informed decisions. Simultaneously, our team at Kodehyve is working on expanding our infrastructure and standalone services. We are working to automate as many real estate development processes as possible to create time, efficiency and quality gains,” said Kodehyve CEO Felix Hemmerling.

After increasing the number of its customers sixfold and its employees fivefold (16), with the recruitment of a head of product in the person of Véronique Ziliotto (ex-AWS), the startup also wants to conquer new markets such as Portugal, Switzerland and the UK.

Originally published in French by and translated for Delano