yaza Closes New Round of Funding as Growth Accelerates
Soaring interest in the new social platform has attracted a who's who of top Silicon Valley and real estate investors
LOS ANGELES, March 11, 2021 (Newswire.com) - yaza, the #1 real estate app for recording and sharing video home tours, closed a new round of funding this week, raising capital to accelerate its growth and expansion. The Silicon Valley-based social video start-up is seeing massive interest from real estate agents, attracted by productivity gains and the desire to build relationships with digital natives, who are just now reaching median first-time home buyer age.
Investors in the round, which was oversubscribed, include leaders from Silicon Valley and real estate. Among them are Tom Ferry, the nation's top real estate coach; current and former executives from PayPal, Apple, and realtor.com; an Ivy-League business school professor; and Gaingels, the first and largest angel group dedicated to supporting LGBTQ founders.
yaza is truly unique. It leverages the power of video storytelling to provide an immersive experience with a real human touch. According to yaza CEO and co-founder Peter Sisson, "We position agents as influencers on the yaza platform, capturing the behaviors we see on social networks like Instagram, Facebook, and Linkedin to harness agents' own social selling skills to drive adoption." Sisson adds, "Existing brokerage and portal sites are outdated Web 1.0 products with no community or social aspects. They all use the same sterile MLS photos and virtual tours and look identical to me. We decided the best approach was to skip all that and use social video to bring homes and neighborhoods alive with exclusive user-generated content."
yaza's growth was initially sparked by its unique Certified Reality™ technology and AI-driven visual search, which together allow for certified story-like home and neighborhood tours to be authenticated, shared, and discovered all on an iPhone. The use of video saves time and enables authentic connections with new buyers, sellers, renters, and property managers in the area.
Funding will be used to accelerate the roll out of the social version of yaza's video tour app, which is currently waitlisted for new members to facilitate a regional roll-out strategy. In the meantime, people can download a limited version that showcases yaza's unique camera and sharing tools from the App Store.
About yaza:
yaza is the #1 real estate app for recording and sharing video home tours. yaza puts the control back into the real estate agents' hands by allowing them to demonstrate their knowledge and experience to build trust with clients and prospects - putting them at the center of the online buying experience. yaza is the flagship app of Yaza Society PBC, a public benefit corporation based in Silicon Valley with a mission to provide tools that promote truth and protect privacy on the internet. The company's groundbreaking Certified Reality™ technology guarantees that what you see in a yaza video happened exactly when and where shown. The Company was founded in 2018, recently won the 2021 HW Tech 100 for Real Estate, was awarded a 2021 Innovators Award and has been selected to join TechCrunch Include's 2020-21 cohort.
Media Contact:
Editor in Chief // yaza
Tara K. Dugan
Tara@yaza.io
Source: Yaza Society
