By Nancy Dahlberg
“We had a whole America to choose from and we chose Miami.”
Giraffe360, a European robotics startup in the property technology space, is planting its US headquarters in Miami, said Mikus Opelts, cofounder and CEO. The Magic City will join its other offices in London and Riga, Latvia, where the company was founded in 2016.
The venture-backed company designs and sells a specialized camera for real estate agents. With its camera and subscription-based platform, agents can create high quality digital photography, 3D floor plans and virtual tours, eliminating the time and cost constraints of hiring a photographer.
“They become content creators themselves and we have designed the whole technology, from the camera to this artificial intelligence processing to the dashboard where they receive all the contents,” Opelts said in an interview with Refresh Miami this week.
The camera is what Giraffe360 is most known for, but the AI processing is key because the editing and file uploading are “clunky stages” that needed automation, said Opelts, whose background is in photography and editing as an owner of a virtual tour company. And the third leg of this giraffe is the dashboard where the agent can see the results with no intervention needed. “It’s a full circle system, from pressing the button on the camera to seeing the photography on the dashboard,” he said, noting that is why 360 is in the company name.
The headquarters news comes on the heels of Giraffe360’s $16 million venture capital raise, led by Founders Fund, in Q4. “After being involved in a number of PropTech startups such as OpenDoor, we’ve recognized that some of these tech forward companies aren’t having their needs met, which means that the mass market definitely isn’t having their needs met. Giraffe360 was a no-brainer, and is really well suited to meet the needs of the market from both the hardware and software front.” said Founders Fund Principal Delian Asparouhov, in the raise announcement. In total, Giraffe360 has raised $22 million.
Also at the end of the year, Giraffe 360 released the fourth version of its camera, called the Giraffe Go Cam, complete with a four inch screen, 500gb of internal memory and fast charging ability. Their latest offering boasts operating speeds three times faster than the previous generation while also being 30% lighter.
Since Giraffe360 delivered the first camera prototype and started the service with just 30 businesses in January 2017, the company has been growing 3X a year, Opelts said. Since 2017, the team has grown from 5 people to 200. Today, the company is servicing more than 1,000 real estate agency brands.
“We have been the leading product in the European market … but we are very new in America. So we want to move really quickly. We have huge goals and we’re really looking for high quality talent in the Miami office that can help us to get there.”
Ten people work in the Miami HQ in Wynwood now, including Opelts, but he expects the team to grow to 30-50 people this year, mainly in sales, marketing and customer success, and to expand from there, adding to a growing proptech sector in South Florida. Giraffe360 is also one of a number of tech companies that have announced Miami HQ expansions in recent months, including Factorial, LeverX and Nowports.
Initially, Opelts was thinking about Atlanta or New York – Miami wasn’t on the radar. But Keith Rabois and Asparouhov “pitched Miami well.” Culturally, it was a great fit, and it was an easy sell, said Opelts, who was born in Latvia and moved to Miami nearly a year ago after growing the company the previous five years while living in London.
How is he finding Miami?
“Surreal is the word that comes to my mind – it doesn’t look like a real place. If I asked AI to show me paradise city, I would guess AI would show me Miami.”
READ MORE ON REFRESH MIAMI:
- Buy, rent, sell, manage: Miami’s proptech ecosystem may be as hot as our real estate market
- HR tech unicorn Factorial chooses Miami for its North American hub, plans to hire up to 150
- Silicon Valley tech company LeverX is relocating to Miami
- Moon Mortgage launches new products to help investors leverage their digital assets
- Social Mobile secures $35M credit facility from Citi to scale its operations globally and locally
- Reeco raises $10M to help hotels tackle supply chain challenges
- Mexican unicorn Nowports makes Miami home for U.S. expansion
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Follow Nancy Dahlberg on Twitter @ndahlberg and email her at [email protected]
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