Bye Excel: Ballast raises $4 million to automate actual property administration

Brazilian startup has just closed a seed round with managers Canary, QED and 1Sharpe

Managing a real estate portfolio is still an analog process and dependent on a myriad of manual updates to Excel spreadsheets. The Brazilian company Lastro promises to change this logic, digitizing processes to serve institutional clients that manage a few billion in properties, as well as families and large individual owners.

Founded last year, Lastro has just validated the thesis with investors. The Brazilian startup has just raised a $4 million seed round to accelerate its real estate portfolio automation. The contribution was led by the managers Canary and QED and also marks the first investment in Brazil by the American 1Sharpe, a firm specializing in real estate assets with more than US$ 7 billion under management.

The idea for the creation of Lastro came from a conversation between Allan Paladino, a former Credit Suisse who acted as financial director at GoWork — a coworking company —, José Thomaz Pereira, responsible for real estate investments at Blackstone, and Alain Michel, founder from Pet World. The trio shared the same pain: the difficulty in managing rents.

To get the plan off the ground, the three brought technology specialist Pedro Milanez, who came with the credentials of having been the first employee hired from Nubank — David Vélez invited him, the now founder of Lastro, to develop the mobile when the roxinho bank was just an idea in a Power Point.

“There’s a long list of what a homeowner needs to do every month: issue a receipt, check that it’s been paid, cover expenses and repairs, pay taxes and insurance. To this day, this has been done by hand. These are very repetitive processes and it was very logical to automate them”, explains Paladino, CEO and co-founder of Lastro.

Source: Pipeline Value