Toronto-based Naborly, which develops a platform for residential tenant screening, announced its acquisition of London, Ontario-based LRANK.com, a real estate location intelligence search engine.
The company said that its acquisition of LRANK’s IP will help Naborly’s artificial intelligence system, called SHERLY, automatically learn about neighbourhoods across the US and Canada. The company hopes that the IP will allow SHERLY to determine if a potential tenant will be happy with the location they are applying to using location traits like distance to schools, public transit accessibility, and demographics.
As part of the acquisition, Naborly announced that Dwight Follick of LRANK would join the team as its CTO. “Dwight’s understanding of developing scalable infrastructure is going to be key to our long-term success, especially as we continue to expand outside of Canada,” said Dylan Lenz, CEO of Naborly. “We’re in an industry where security and business continuity is essential. It’s the only way we’re going to be able to continue to disrupt traditional tenant screening and credit reporting.”
In early October, Naborly raised $1.25 million in seed funding. The company said that it has been growing primarily through partnering with other RentTech companies via their Tenant Screening API, which allows other companies to quickly add tenant-screening capabilities to their own rental apps. The company said it’s working on rebuilding its infrastructure to deal with growth in the US and Canada.
“Naborly is solving a huge rental problem in a new, meaningful way, going far beyond typical screenings,” said Follick. “The approach is heavily data-driven and I’m excited to bring my data science background and assets into the venture.”