Casavo’s rise has largely come out of three main areas: the pandemic, the gaps in the property market in Europe as it exists today, and Casavo’s particular approach to tackling that.

Opendoor opened the door, so to speak, to the idea of applying technology to the concept of house flipping to both scale the opportunity and make it considerably more efficient. While its share price is being hammered at the moment in a wider downturn for tech stocks overall, it’s a strong enough concept that it’s inspired a number of others to follow in its footsteps. In the latest development, an Opendoor-style startup called Casavo, out of Italy, is announcing that it has raised €400 million (about $410 million currently).

It plans to use the money to expand its business across Europe on the back of a platform that today is listing close to 4,000 homes in Italy, Spain and Portugal and has to date (since being founded at the end of 2018) sold some 3,200 properties for an aggregate value of €1 billion, according to CEO and founder Giorgio Tinacci.

The funding is coming in the form of a €100 million Series D and €300 million in debt to buy up and fix up properties. Casavo noted that this Series D is the largest “proptech” equity investment to date in Europe, while the debt round takes the startup’s borrowing capacity to half a billion euros.

Read More at Finance

Read the rest at Finance