Montreal-based proptech startup Local Logic has raised $17.5 million CAD in Series B funding to continue its expansion in the United States while developing a series of new data products.
Co-founder Vincent-Charles Hodder told BetaKit that the company intends to move toward predictive and prescriptive artificial intelligence (AI) to help its customers make better quality decisions when it comes to location-based risks and opportunities in real estate.
With more than 85 billion unique data points, the platform creates digital twins of cities.
GroundBreak Ventures and the provincial innovation fund Investissement Québec led the round, with participation from Band Capital Partners (an affiliate of Triovest Realty Advisors), Cycle Capital, Desjardins Group, Jones Boys Ventures, Second Century Ventures, and Shadow Ventures.
The raise closed in early June.
Local Logic describes itself as a location-intelligence platform that digitizes the built world for consumers, investors, developers, and governments.
With more than 85 billion unique data points–the largest unique location dataset in the U.S. and Canada–the platform creates digital twins of cities. Local Logic claims it quantifies the built world and offers predictive, precise analytics to inform the present and future of over 250 million individual addresses, Local Logic claims.
Local Logic claims it provides the industry with granular, proprietary, and actionable location insights to understand how the built world impacts the risk and return of real estate investment decisions of all scales and at all levels of sophistication.
Moving forward, the startup wants to expand its partnerships with broker sites and multiple listing service (MLS) organizations to impact every real estate decision in the United States and Canada.
How people move around is dictated by the built world, according to Hodder. Factors that affect home buyers, developers and investors include things like whether there’s a grocery store next door, and whether you can walk to work or to public transportation.
“We strongly believe a consumer or investor will be able to consider those things if we’re able to quantify them and tell that story through data,” Hodder said.
To that end, Local Logic presents location as data, which could encompass everything from a heat map or a visually pleasing graphic, to indices presented as a numerical score such as for walkability, for example.
RELATED: Local Logic wants to impact the way people use cities with its data-driven platform
Apparently, the idea of location-based data resonates. Local Logic claims some 100 enterprise customers with over 15 million users a month. Hodder said the startup runs on a B2B model or a business-to-business-to-consumer (B2B2C)C model. For that service, Local Logic operates as a data-as-a-service with a recurring fee.
The startup’s origins date back to 2015 when Hodder, Gabriel Damant-Sirois, and Colin Stewart met at McGill University’s School of Urban Planning. At that time, they were looking for a way to build better cities at scale.
But, as they grew familiar with the real estate industry, they realized all players–no matter their size–still relied on intuition and gut feeling to make major decisions.
The three founders decided to fill that gap and build a tool that would provide objective, quantifiable data, and metrics so the real-estate industry could remove the guesswork from their processes and accelerate decision-making around location.
It became a prescient idea. While homebuyers, developers, investors and others are still interested in the physical asset they’re purchasing, such location factors as wildfire or flooding risk have become just as important, if not more so.
“What we’re really excited about is we’re trying to tell the story of where that location has been, where it is today, and how it is evolving over time,” Hodder said. ”What is it going to be like in five years? What are the risks or if you think about things like climate risk, or the change over time? We’re really bullish on our ability to offer that visibility so folks are making a more informed decision as to whether that fits their lifestyle or what they’re trying to achieve.”
Local Logic secured $8 million CAD in Series A financing in 2020. Previously the startup raised a $1.15 million funding round led by Cycle Capital Management in June 2017.
The startup currently sits at around 60 employees, but over the next year plans to add new roles in the US, and more engineers in Montreal.
Hodder added that it’s a good representation of the appetite in commercial real estate and proptech in general for more data and analytics. “It’s becoming top-of-mind for the industry.”
Feature image courtesy Unsplash (photo by JC Gellidon).