TORONTO – October 24, 2024 – Mave, the AI assistant for real estate, today announced it has raised CAD$2 million in pre-seed funding and launched its beta program for agents and brokers. The investment, which was raised and closed in just a few weeks, was led by Relay Ventures and N49P with participation from Alate Partners, Clarim Ventures, and Gambit Partners, along with several angel and strategic investors including a past-president of the Toronto Real Estate Board.
When Mave founder and CEO Raz Zohar and his wife bought their first home, it sparked curiosity about the extensive, time-consuming work that real estate agents manage behind the scenes to close a deal. With over 4.5 million homes sold yearly in North America by 2 million agents across 350,000 brokerages, Raz wanted to understand why agents invest more than 35 hours doing administrative work for each transaction, and why the industry had not yet evolved to improve this. So he became an executive assistant for agents across the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), gaining firsthand experience with the constant demands on agents’ time and their reliance on phone calls, texts, and emails to manage tasks while juggling client needs across the city. Raz discovered that brokerages strive to support agents, but with their commission split per deal getting smaller and smaller, many lack resources for dedicated backend assistance. Recognizing this gap, along with the opportunity presented by the rapid improvements in artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLM), Mave was born as an AI assistant for real estate agents and brokers.
While Mave has been operating in stealth mode, it has already attracted interest from over 6,000 real estate agents across more than 90 brokerages in the GTA. From this pool of prospective users, Mave has selected 1,000 to initially onboard as part of its beta program. Brokers interested in the beta program for the Mave AI assistant can join the waitlist at maveai.co/sign-up.
In the last few months, Mave has grown to a team of ten, and is now actively hiring for engineering, product, marketing, and sales roles.
To effectively support agents, the team at Mave has worked tirelessly to secure access to extensive market data and related property information through partnerships with real estate boards and other data providers. As the Mave AI assistant is trained using these deep insights, it enables real estate agents to harness market and neighbourhood insights to respond instantly to client requests and deliver an even greater level of customer service. Agents simply text questions to Mave such as “What is the price per square foot of homes in this postal code?” With Mave, research and analysis no longer takes agents an entire day.
With the Mave AI assistant, agents are more productive, and brokerages can finally offer the type of support their agents need to turn the stressful, anxiety-producing experience of buying or selling a home into a seamless transaction. Mave quickly automates backend tasks, such as creating social media posts, marketing materials, e-mails, and presentations in seconds, not hours or days. Since agents mainly use their phones to text or message their back-office teams, Mave seamlessly fits into existing workflows, enabling agents to interact with the AI assistant via text messages just as they would their real assistants to get tasks done.
“Not much has changed in recent years about the way the real estate industry operates. To modernize their brokerages, many look to existing tools for help. But these can be overwhelming for agents to use given the sheer volume of tasks for each listing and the fact that agents are always on the go. Mave is the first solution we’ve seen that really solves the core problems the industry faces in a way that is easy enough for any agent to adopt,” said **Alex Baker, Managing Partner at Relay Ventures. “Raz’s vision is to harness the power of AI so any brokerage can streamline its backend operations and support its agents using something as simple as text and nothing more. We believe in Raz and his team and are confident that this is the right approach for the industry. With a critical mass of brokerages using Mave, it will become the operating system for the residential real estate industry.”
The number of reported daily wins and use cases shared by agents testing the platform have already exceeded Mave’s expectations. For example, for one agent participating in the beta program, the ability to immediately respond to a client’s questions and very quickly price the property enabled them to secure a listing within 24 hours. Another agent that used Mave to optimize a listing saw showings go from zero to 11 in one week. Another agent used Mave to create the concept, script, post, and caption for an Instagram campaign that led to a sale for $100,000 over the asking price.
”While our initial focus is on handling marketing tasks, with the funding in place we are expanding our development to establish Mave as a full-time assistant,” said Raz Zohar, founder and CEO of Mave. “Mave will handle key back-end administrative tasks, from coordinating an open house to finalizing contracts better and faster than ever before. This will enable agents to focus on what matters most – servicing their customers and growing their brand.”
Among the first Mave beta customers is PSR Brokerage, a luxury boutique real estate firm with over 150 agents in Southern Ontario, including Toronto, Muskoka, Forest Hill, Vaughan, and Port Credit. The brokerage specializes in resale and pre-construction sales, supported by high-end marketing services for its clients. Within the first week of signing up to participate in the Mave beta program, 60 percent of agents are actively using the AI assistant at least six times per week.