Malaysian data startup Urbanmetry secures $2m in pre-Series A funding

Malaysian AI-driven city and property data startup Urbanmetry has announced raising $2 million in its pre-Series A funding led by Monk’s Hill Ventures.

The fresh funding will be used by the Kuala Lumpur-based business to develop intelligent data solutions and platforms to serve end-users in the property and mortgage industries. A portion of the funds will be utilized to expand the company’s product, technology, data, and business development teams.

Urbanmetry is a property data firm that uses artificial intelligence and proprietary algorithms to extract trends and patterns in the built environment from massive amounts of city-data.

It makes this data available to the public and private sectors in order to improve city planning, establish a more efficient and transparent property market, and form a more sustainable urban environment.

Urbanmetry CEO and Founder Koh Cha-Ly, said for years, their engineers have been building in-house AI and data-powered solutions to help banks, government, and property developers better quantify risks and opportunities in the real estate market.

However, the data gap is detrimental to both key industry players and individual homeowners alike.

“In the future, our team plans to push the technological envelope further to better fund homeowners and build sustainable cities for our shared future,” added Urbanmetry.

UEM Sunrise, Kuok Group, RHB Bank, and the World Bank are among the startup’s 150 corporate clients in the region. Before making multimillion-dollar investment decisions, clients work with Urbanmetry to do due diligence and analysis of the housing and property market.

Urbanmetry offers products for homeowners in addition to giving data and insight to institutional clients. Urbanmetry has created Nowcast to aid homebuyers in making their mortgage commitment. This AI-powered application uses machine learning to predict the value of a home-based on 90 city data characteristics. Mortgage candidates in Malaysia can now get Nowcast reports through their banks.