Proptech Clikalia has secured $518 million in debt and equity in what is among the largest venture capital rounds raised in Spain to date. Repeat entrepreneurs Alister Moreno and Pablo Fernandez founded the company in 2018 with the intent of providing Spaniards with digital options when buying and selling their homes. The iBuyer model that had proven popular in the United States by the likes of Opendoor and Redfin is also resonating with Europeans. Clikalia is currently at a run rate of over 1,800 properties acquired, which represents 7x to 8x growth versus a year ago. It also has a team of over 600 people. It recently acquired Inmho, a Spanish property management company, to expand its capabilities in that area. The buy, execs said, will provide access to over 250,000 residential units. Los Angeles-based Fifth Wall led the approximately $70 million equity financing for Clikalia, which also included participation from Luxor Capital and Mouro Capital. Deutsche Bank provided the nearly $450 million in debt financing. Interestingly, Fifth Wall is also an investor in Opendoor as well as Loft, a Latin American real estate tech unicorn. Luxor has invested in U.S. iBuyer Offerpad.
Clikalia guarantees sellers “immediate” liquidity through an offer on their property as quickly as within 24 hours and, if accepted, a sale within seven days. In about 70% of the cases, Clikalia then renovates a property and puts it back on the market. Its mission is to leverage its “proprietary” technology to digitize a historically slow and painful home selling process. The Spanish market is one of the largest markets in Europe when it comes to residential real estate — with the equivalent of over 300,000 transactions per year. It’s a massive market, and the process of selling a home in Europe and Spain specifically is extraordinarily time consuming, expensive, and inconvenient.