Land sourcing platform Searchland has raised £2.3m in seed funding from Fuel Ventures. Searchland, which launched last year, intends to use the funds to integrate additional datasets and further automate land sourcing processes so developers can rapidly find, validate and acquire off market sites for development and build more homes.
The proptech company was founded by Mitchell Fasanya, previously co-founder and CTO of influencer marketing agency FanBytes (acquired by Brainlabs), land planner Hugh Gibbs, data scientist Arthur Goodhart and computer scientist Archie Kennedy-Dyson to ‘turbo charge land sourcing processes’.
Fasanya said: “Having tried to find a site of my own to build on, I discovered there was very considerable friction in the land sourcing process. The property industry is rich in data but it wasn’t being leveraged effectively and developers were having to trawl through a myriad of clunky databases to track down the information they needed. While modern digital tools had emerged they failed to eradicate the industry’s antiquated processes and were prohibitively expensive for the majority of developers.
“In less than a year we’ve built the most sophisticated platform for land sourcing and we have a conversion rate of 70-80%. Ultimately we want to offload all of the admin heavy tasks for developers so they can focus on what they do best – building homes. This funding round will allow us to accelerate product development and advance further ahead of the competition.”
Mark Pearson, founder and managing partner at Fuel Ventures, added: “Searchland has created a very powerful and highly scalable product that is set to become the industry standard for land sourcing thanks to its customer-driven approach and pace of innovation. We were very impressed by the team and were keen to lead the current round with a significant ticket.”
