Boston, MA – May 20, 2021 – Torii, a next-generation real estate brokerage with an app that allows users to search for homes via a Tinder-like interface (swipe right to match with your perfect home), are thrilled to announce a successful seed round of venture funding from a number of noted VCs.
Born out of the frustration of Torii’s CEO James Rogers’ experience with an ineffectual and archaic system, he founded Torii to reimagine the entire way people buy homes from top to bottom, search to close. With Torii, homebuyers have access to helpful tools in the Torii app, work with a dedicated agent and a whole team behind them, get their closing costs refunded (averaging around $7500!), and then get a personalized Move-In Survival Kit (with toiletries and cleaners, plus other fun and must-have items that are probably still packed away) to smooth their move!
The company has just completed a $3.2m Seed Round and are excited to announce some notable investment including $1m from Lookout founder Kevin Mahaffey’s SNR.VC, $1m from noted crypto hedge fund founder Dan Matuszewski’s CMS Holdings, $1m from longtime noted investor Jason Calacanis’ LAUNCH, and around $200k from smaller accredited investors.
This is in addition to a successful $1.4m Pre-Seed round in 2019 that saw an investment of $1.1m from Calacanis’ LAUNCH Accelerator and $310k from the founders’ actual friends and family.
The site launched in 2018 at first offering sales in their HQ location, Boston, but have since added the Bay Area in California, and they just launched in the Los Angeles area last month.
Even with residential real estate in an extreme seller’s market, Torii’s licensed real estate team continuously receives 5-star reviews for their flexibility, responsiveness, knowledge of the real estate market, and their ability to advise their clients on making offers that win and close. Torii’s intuitive platform allows users to search for a property, schedule showings, submit an offer and live chat with their team, all from their phones.
In addition to a wonderful interface and dedicated, talented staff, Torii’s business model pays agents a salary plus commission (instead of the typical real estate commission-only structure) and uses the buyer’s agent commission to pay their buyer’s closing costs, saving clients an average of $7500 per transaction.
Torii CEO James Rogers notes, “we’re looking forward to using this investment to continue to build our incredible team in our current markets while adding new cities throughout 2021. We’ll also continue to develop our machine learning-powered search, that ‘learns’ what each buyer is looking for while they swipe through homes, similar to dating app interfaces – what style of home they like, what home amenities truly matter to them, and more, allowing buyers to find the right home faster, while we continue to decrease friction in real estate transactions while creating a seamless experience for buyers.”
About Torii:
Torii has streamlined the home buying process by integrating the power of automation and machine learning with the personal touch of human-to-human customer service. Our licensed real estate team continuously receives 5-star reviews for their flexibility, responsiveness, and knowledge of the real estate market. Our intuitive platform allows users to search for a property, schedule showings, submit an offer, live chat with our team, and track an offer’s progress, all from their phones. Why buy a home any other way? This is the new standard of real estate.
Torii is fully licensed and operates in Massachusetts and California, specializing in homes for sale in Greater Boston, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Los Angeles.