DotLoop Raises Capital to Expand its Paperwork-Killing Technology Beyond Real Estate
By Erin Griffith
On May 22, 2012
DotLoop, a four-year-old, Cincinnati-based startup has outgrown its home state and initial focus.
With a new $7 million Series A from Trinity Ventures under its belt, DotLoop will plant a flag in San Francisco and will work on early plans to expand its real estate enterprise product into fields such as insurance, legal services, financial services, or health care. “Our vision is to eliminate paperwork where there are two or more people and lots of back and forth and negotiation,” founder Austin Allison says.
Alongside that announcement, the company said it would make its technology free for realtors to use. Previously DotLoop’s main product, a specialized sort of Google Docs on steriods, was only available through brokerage subscriptions. Now DotLoop offers a freemium model where individual brokers can use the technology and their brokerages can pay to upgrade. The upgrades include tools to help brokerages manage their entire business, including the incoming sale pipeline.
The company launched in 2009 and gathered $2.7 million in angel backing in the process. It became profitable in April 2010. Users grow 25 percent each month (there are now 200,000 agency subscribers) and revenues grow 70 percent each quarter, Allison says. DotLoop counts four of the top five real estate brokerages among its clients.
“It’s cheesy to say, but our biggest competitor is the status quo,” he says. A status quo weighed down by an endless string of documents. DotLoop cleverly loops documents between parties so that each person involved is always working on the most up-to-date version of the document, faxing and email attachments be damned. Allison decided to launch the company after becoming shocked by the amount of back and forth involved as both a buyer and broker of houses.
The company has 20 people on its dev team in Ohio; it’ll look to add 20 more in San Francisco, where Allison plans to move himself.
Erin Griffith covers New York startups for PandoDaily. She's worked as staff writer for Adweek and a private equity blogger for peHUB. Her writing has appeared in VCJ, Time Out New York, Huffington Post, FT.com, and BUST. She plays keyboard in a band called Team Genius and Tweets as @Eringriffith.
