Altrio co-founders Raj Singh (left, the CEO) and Jon Simpson (right, the CTO). (Courtesy Altrio)

Toronto-headquartered property technology firm Altrio has closed an $8-million round of Series A funding to add staff and spur product development.

Altrio provides software and data solutions to the global real estate investment and lending industries. Its first product is Origin, a data-driven, cloud-based deal management platform that helps investors and lenders of all sizes harness proprietary and market data along with process automation.

“With real estate investing, you’re usually scrounging up information from brokers, sellers, the assets you own in a particular market and what’s happening in terms of performance, and all of that information is very fragmented,” Altrio CEO Raj Singh told RENX.

“Origin allows our customers to pull information together, organize it and create a mineable database to properly leverage all of that information.”

Singh said Origin will take users all the way through the investment process, from the initial screening stage to the closing of a deal, and provides a single source of information about an organization’s investment pipeline, owned assets and proprietary market knowledge.

This reduces the time required to perform administrative tasks, keeps team members coordinated and streamlines the flow of information across a company’s global operations.

“It tracks what deals you’re working on and where those deals are in the process,” said Singh. “It helps you keep track of upcoming key dates, what tasks need to be done, and who’s doing what on the project.”

Altrio’s financial backers

Altrio officially launched in January 2020. It raised a seed round of funding in August 2021, led by N49P and QuadReal Property Group, which also contributed to the latest round of financing. The company claims its revenues have increased by six times and its customers have increased by seven times in the interim.

The latest round of funding was led by Whitecap Venture Partners, with additional participation from Mantella Venture Partners, Alate Partners and Colliers.

Altrio plans to use the funds to double its head count from 26 today to more than 50 by the end of the year. It has employees working remotely across Canada and in the United States as well as at the Toronto head office.

Altrio states that customers have combined assets under management of more than $1 trillion and include two of the world’s three largest real estate investors. Users manage equity and debt transactions in every commercial real estate sector across the Americas, Europe and Asia.

“We have investors investing in everything from raw land to traditional commercial to hospitality, seniors housing, student living and logistics,” said Singh. “We have customers with as few as two or three users and we have customers with close to 1,000 users.”

Altrio uses a software as a service business model where customers pay licence fees of varying amounts depending on the size of the organization and number of users.

Despite an institutionally managed commercial real estate market that Altrio says is valued at $11 trillion and is expected to grow to $40 trillion globally over the next two decades, real estate investors, managers, lenders, borrowers and brokers often lack the data they need to invest with confidence and the workflow automation capabilities they need to get deals done quickly.

That’s the premise from which Altrio and Origin evolved.

“I came to realize that there was a really big gap in the capital markets around solutions for investors,” said Singh. “Lots of software has been created for property managers, leasing brokers and accountants, but investors were really for the most part doing their work in Excel and e-mails.”

Altrio’s co-founders

Singh has has spent more than 20 years working at the intersection of real estate and technology. He was the co-founder and CEO of Voyanta, a real estate data management and analytics platform that was sold to ARGUS in 2016.

He subsequently joined that company as executive vice-president of product management and marketing.

Prior to that, Singh was co-founder and executive director at Hipercept, which provided consulting, technology and managed services to the alternative investments industry. It was acquired by RealPage in 2019.

Singh started his career at Brookfield, where he led the internal development of proprietary software solutions.

Altrio co-founder and chief technology officer Jon Simpson has spent his career building and scaling cloud software products across finance, retail and real estate. He was most recently deputy CTO at FundApps, a financial technology regulatory compliance startup.

He previously co-founded and was CTO of Retail Loop, which built mobile workflow solutions for retailers.