Real estate investment tech startup mogul, aka mogul club, just raised $3.6 million in a seed round — a cool $1.5 million more than its founders set out for.
AY Ventures led the round for the DC startup, with participation from Tim Draper & Associates, Draper B1, InterVest, Draper Drago, Blizzard Fund, and angel investors including US Treasurer Rosa Rios. Mogul was founded in 2021 by Alex Blackwood and Joey Gumataotao, both formerly of the Goldman Sachs Real Estate Investment Group, and has raised $4.2 million since then.
The mogul team created a platform where property ownership and investments are tracked and recorded with blockchain, with a goal of increasing security. Blackwood, cofounder and CEO, said this infusion is a departure from the company’s early days focused on building the initial technology together and working toward a common goal. Now, the team can focus on refining the product and execution.
In the past six months, the company has revamped the brand and the site, cut down on signup time for the platform from 10 minutes to 30 seconds, and reduced fees, per Blackwood. From there, the team could get serious about funding.
Initially, the CEO told Technical.ly, mogul sought $2.1 million, but the round upsized four times before landing at $3.6 million.
“The idea was if we could just extend out runway, not to mention utilize a lot of that extended runway, and more execution, focus and strategic spending, we could ultimately lead to a higher return later on down the road for the corporate investors and ourselves as well,” Blackwood said. “So it was focused on really just growing out the platform, growing out the vision, but in a much more concentrated sprint than the extended runway that we’ve previously been thinking about.”
The startup currently has four full-time employees, with an additional 10 contractors, and is currently hiring for two more. In the next three to six months, Blackwood said he plans to bring on three more on the engineering and marketing teams.
Right now, though, the focus is the platform’s assets — they’ll have about 2.7 million properties on mogul club by the end of the month. By January, Blackwood wants to get that number up to 5 million, and 80 to 100 million within the year.
With that in mind, the priority will be adding properties and then scaling the company as that number grows. For now, the founders are celebrating the funding win, especially so early on the journey, but plan to keep moving forward with this momentum.
“It definitely was a little scarier at first, but with the new team that we’ve brought on board, I have the utmost respect and trust in them to be able to build out this platform the way that we want to,” Blackwood said of mogul’s early success. “While it’s nice to stop and smell the roses for a day, we definitely have been hitting it even harder, if not counting our blessings, and really hitting it as hard as we can heading into the new year.”