{"id":342079,"date":"2017-05-26T23:20:56","date_gmt":"2017-05-26T15:20:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/techcrunch.com\/?p=1496406"},"modified":"2017-05-26T23:20:56","modified_gmt":"2017-05-26T15:20:56","slug":"riley-raises-3-1m-to-help-real-estate-agents-rate-and-respond-to-their-leads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/riley-raises-3-1m-to-help-real-estate-agents-rate-and-respond-to-their-leads\/","title":{"rendered":"Riley raises $3.1M to help real estate agents rate and respond to their leads"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

Businesses usually\u00a0spend lots of time and money trying of\u00a0attract potential customers. Now a startup called Riley<\/a> aims to help them prioritize those sales leads.<\/p>\n

Riley was part of the winter class at Y Combinator. (In fact, CEO Daniel Ahmadizadeh said he and his co-founder Helson Taveras applied several times with different products and ideas before getting in.) The startup is announcing today that it has raised $3.1 million in seed funding.<\/p>\n

The current version of Riley is focused on real estate agents. If you see an ad or listing for an agent who\u2019s using Riley\u00a0and you decide to give them your information, you\u2019ll get a text message within a few minutes from the agent\u2019s \u201coffice manager\u201d or \u201cassistant,\u201d asking some basic questions about you and what you\u2019re looking for.<\/p>\n

So even if the agent is busy or sleeping, the potential customer\u00a0still gets a response right away. And it goes beyond being a simple auto-responder \u2014 Riley has a team of live concierges (Ahmadizadeh said they\u2019re mostly college students for now) who\u00a0follow scripts. Over time, as the real estate agents\u00a0rate their performance and review their scripts, the concierges should get better.<\/p>\n

And after each conversation, Riley can tell the agent which leads should be pursued first.<\/p>\n

\"Riley<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cWhen the real estate agent wakes up in the morning, they\u2019ll know which hot lead they should focus on, versus the nine other cold leads that came in the middle of\u00a0the night,\u201d Ahmadizadeh said.<\/p>\n

Riley\u2019s funding comes from YC, FundersClub, Social Capital, Fuel Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Liquid 2 Ventures, Rough Draft Ventures and angel investors<\/a> including WayUp CEO Liz Wessel and YC\u2019s Michael Seibel and Paul Buchheit.<\/p>\n

Ahmadizadeh said Riley has already built software to make the interaction easier for the concierges, and over time, he hopes to automate more of the process \u2014 though even under the current system, Riley is already managing more than 100,000 conversations each month.<\/p>\n

In addition, he eventually plans to expand beyond working with real estate agents: \u201cOur thought\u00a0longer term is to be vertical agnostic \u2014 not just real estate \u2014 and communication-channel agnostic.\u201d<\/p>\n

Featured Image: Riley<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"Riley Businesses usually\u00a0spend lots of time and money trying of\u00a0attract potential customers. Now a startup called Riley aims to help them prioritize those sales leads. Riley was part of the winter class at Y Combinator. (In fact, CEO Daniel Ahmadizadeh said he and his co-founder Helson Taveras applied several times with different products and ideas before getting in.) The startup is announcing… Read More<\/a><\/p>\n

\n<\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a>\n<\/div>\n

\"\"\/ <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5817,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[59,66,26],"class_list":["post-342079","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-media","tag-techcrunch","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342079","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5817"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=342079"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342079\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=342079"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=342079"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=342079"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}