Our founders, Ben Hizak and L.D. Salmanson, have been friends since the fourth grade, and business partners since junior high. Ben and L.D.’s first company was an IT service company, catering to the growing demand for connected networks. They later successfully sold that company, sparking a passion for building companies and a partnership that would change their lives. They have worked on many other things together since, with Cherre being the most recent.

Prior to Cherre, Ben co-founded Sirenum, a UK-based software company. L.D. co-founded Greencrest Capital where he recognized that there was very little data-driven investment and underwriting decision making in the industry, despite an abundance of available data. L.D. made an effort to programmatically connect disparate data and quickly uncovered hidden insights and alpha-generating opportunities. L.D. streamlined his process and built better decision making models for late-stage Private Equity (PE) investments. He later sold his company to Oppenheimer and became the Executive Director of Oppenheimer’s Private Shares Group.

Having made a significant impact on PE, L.D. and Ben set their eyes on the much larger real estate market: ~$50 trillion in the U.S. and ~$290 trillion globally. They noticed that the real estate market suffers from many of the same challenges that they identified in the PE space.

While real estate stakeholders – investors, underwriters, and other intermediaries, have a wealth of experience and are extremely smart and accomplished, their decisions are predominantly based on, or at least heavily-weighted towards, uncodified experience and somewhat limited supporting data. 

The data that is available, is disparate, partial, siloed, expensive, and fundamentally incompatible from both a conceptual and data structure perspective. Models are only as good as the connected data that feeds them, and seemingly simple questions around asset value and risk are still very complex and hard to answer as a result.

Over the years we’ve seen an explosion in the number of available datasets, whether free or paid, so that even the most sophisticated stakeholders in the market are constantly finding themselves uninformed by the latest data. The ability to manage internal data for financial and operational reporting and benchmarking, as well as investment and disposition, has become an insurmountable challenge for even the most sophisticated and well-financed stakeholders. At the same time, an explosion of required external data sources that were never designed to interact with existing internal or external data sources or applications, has left stakeholders with little ability to keep up, never mind build and maintain a competitive advantage.

To solve this challenge, managers today either turn to limited-scope vendors or aggregators of data for point-solutions or markets or, alternatively, spend millions building limited-scope internal data lakes. Neither option solves the problem in any meaningful way, nor does it allow companies to leverage such information in a useful manner. It’s not that such vendors lack the willingness or zeal to expand their offering to interoperate with other vendors, it’s that existing real estate data architectures are not flexible enough to encompass all the internal and external data that is to be connected, without requiring fully manual customization and dedicated ongoing maintenance. 

Cherre’s vision is to transform real estate investing and underwriting into a science. Our mission is to connect all real estate data and make it accessible for better investment and underwriting decisions.

To help provide real estate decision makers with a solution to leverage their data and make better decisions, Cherre built a platform that seamlessly connects disparate real estate data. By connecting and unifying their datasets, Cherre’s customers are able to make consistent, data-driven decisions across the entire organization. Cherre enables customers to easily consume a wealth of public data (hundreds of thousands of data sets covering everything from transactions and mortgages, to demographics and school districts) out of the box, as well as instantly connect to our proprietary and unprecedented partner network, which includes almost all major data vendors and 3rd-party applications. 

Cherre provides flexible delivery methods so customers can either access their connected data via a powerful GraphQL API, or incorporate that data into Business Intelligence tools, visualization applications, or data science and modeling solutions. Cherre is scalable and secure, and can support any use case and handle any kind of data – agnostic of the source. 

We set out to build a platform that can support data-driven prospecting, investing, disposition, and management of assets; a platform that could enable banks and insurance companies to automate equity, debt, and risk underwriting; and a platform that can support a new cohort of technology companies to enable and support this industry’s growth into the future. That is Cherre.

Our reputation in the market is second to none. In the four years since we’ve founded the company, we quickly became the leader in our space and validated our vision with a fast-growing list of top clients – the largest investors, banks, and insurance companies in the world.  A whole breed of new technology companies exist because of our platform, adding value to millions of end customers  every day. We’re backed by the leading investors in the real estate space, as well as the largest investor in AI in the world, including Intel Capital, Navitas, Carthona, and Zigg.

We look forward to building this future together!

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