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Real estate software company Sierra Interactive was acquired by ASG, a component of private equity firm Alpine Investors, according to a press release.
Sierra Interactive builds lead-generation and marketing tools for real estate agents and is now alongside Homebot, DoorLoop, NestReady and AirDNA in the ASG/Alpine proptech ecosystem. ASG invests heavily in growing, vertical software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies.
Sierra Interactive has been in business for 16 years with the last five being its most productive, founder Ben Peskoe said in a statement.
“With that growth, we began to get a real sense of the huge opportunities in front of us — as well as the challenges that would come along with them,” said Peskoe. “To keep delivering new, innovative features and support at the scale and pace we wanted to, we needed to find a partner whose vision for Sierra was as big as our own, and we found it in ASG.”
Agents in more than 400 markets use Sierra Interactive to acquire and nurture leads, leveraging custom, SEO-focused website design services and digital advertising features. It further supports customers with an integrated CRM to which potential new business can be funneled and nurtured.
Peskoe and Chief Operating Officer Brandon Hedges will continue to help lead the business, according to the release, but there will be a new CEO, Peter Maglathlin, and Chief Technology Officer, Jeffrey Campbell.
“Teams and their agents remain at the heart of the residential real estate transaction, despite the many attempts at ‘disrupting’ the industry over the last decade,” Maglathlin said in a statement. “It’s very exciting to join a company that serves those teams and agents directly, with software to help them close even more.”
Alpine Software Group led a $20 million Series A funding round for property management player DoorLoop last month, which has now secured $30 million to date.
While the brakes are on in the venture capital space after a massive 2021, ample funds need to be deployed, according to panelists at Inman Connect Las Vegas.
“The valuation correction was broadly healthy,” Vik Chawla, of Fifth Wall Ventures, said at the event. And relative to the funding activity of 2021, he added, “Future investors will look back at it and scratch their heads.”
Nevertheless, VC funds pent-up from their 2021 activity need an outlet, according to Clelia Peters, managing partner of Era Ventures.
“We went through this boom period of raising venture capital funds,” she said at Connect. “And we have more venture capital funds and those funds are better capitalized than they have ever been, and that capital is going to need to be deployed.”
Sierra’s acquisition and DoorLoop’s funding are not the only recent examples of Peters’ prescience.
RentSpree landed a Series B round of $17 million in August, homeowner portal developer Milestones secured a $10 million Series A in July and topping both is Landing, which hauled in a Series C round of $125 million.
Sierra Interactive is based in Louisville, Kentucky.
