Citics CEO & founder Tran Minh Long
Citics, a Vietnamese online real estate platform, announces that it has raised US$1.3 million in a bridge round before a planned Series A next year.
The round is led by Vietnam Investment Group, a US$50 million investment fund focusing on high-growth businesses, with participation by local real estate firm BHS Group and existing investor Vulpes Investment Management.
The fresh funding will be channelled to develop Citics’s current business with new offerings. Another portion will be utilised to advance Citics’s platforms and technologies to better serve its bank partners.
In December 2021, the startup plans to release the mobile app Citics Valuer and a new version of its real estate valuation platform Citics Valuation, which allows bankers to collect details and preliminary values of properties within a few clicks.
Citics claims that the new version will help banks examine the mortgage risks of properties and reduce the execution time to less than three hours, one-fourth of the usual time.
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Founded in 2018 by former CEO of real estate broker Cen Group’s southern Vietnam region Tran Minh Long, Citics develops a data platform to support real estate transactions, including real estate valuation, sales-purchase, lease, and mortgage.
Its board of directors also has Nguyen Hai Ninh, founder and former CEO of Vietnamese coffee house chain The Coffee House, and Pham Anh Duc, founder of ViCare, a startup that provides information on hospitals, clinics, doctors, drugs and symptoms of diseases.
Citics is said to apply big data and algorithms, combined with actual property surveys, into its appraisal service, covering real estate, movable property, and investment projects.
As stated on the company’s website, to date, Citics’s database consists of over 12 million real estate data, more than two thousand projects, and 1,4 million transaction records.
The startup boasts of having successfully expanded into 25 provinces and cities in Vietnam and formed eight partnerships with new banks over the past year. It counts local banks such as VIB, HDB, Sacombank, and Shinhanbank, among its current 17 cooperative banks.
The proptech sector has gained momentum in Vietnam as the tech-savvy population turned online for their property transactions during the pandemic. With the proven value in improving the transparency of the local real estate market, startups in the sector are mushrooming to the tune of more than 100 startups, according to PropTech Vietnam Network’s data. Propzy,Homebase, and Rever are some Vietnamese proptechs snagging bid deals in the last two years.
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Image Credit: Citics
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