New Clients Are Hard – Deals From Existing Contacts Are Much Easier

01 /The Concept

This startup was founded 10 years ago. It grew, raised capital – but its last funding round before now was back in 2023. Then a few days ago it raised again, and this round was the largest in its history: $37M, including $15M in debt.

And the round wasn't raised for what the company was doing before – it was raised for what it's doing now. Which, as it turns out, follows directly from what it was doing before. The best kind of pivot.

Luxury Presence is a platform for real estate agents that helps them attract new clients.

Agents can quickly build a personal website and property-specific app, launch marketing campaigns, and manage leads generated through contact forms on both. It sounds simple – but it works. In 2025, the company's revenue grew 40% to $100M in annualized revenue, and it turned operationally profitable.

The platform now serves 87,000 individual agents and 17,000 real estate agencies. Agents using Luxury Presence grow six times faster and close three times more deals than the industry average.

02 /Why It Matters

The new phase of the platform rolls out under the banner "From digital presence to a growth engine." Here's what that means in practice.

The founder's idea for Luxury Presence came early in his career, working alongside a veteran agent. That agent was excellent with clients but ignored the technology tools available to him – because they were outdated, clunky, and didn't solve his actual problems.

Early Luxury Presence was about giving agents "a digital home that matches their reputation" – because reputation was increasingly being built online. The company built a platform focused on websites, SEO, and digital advertising, all purpose-built for the real estate business.

It worked. The platform launched and the business grew. Then the founder's wife decided to become a real estate agent and started using her husband's platform. That gave him a front-row seat to what actually happens to users as they scale.

Her site performed. She started closing deals. Her contact list grew. But as that list grew, so did the time she spent working it – remembering who might be interested in what, reaching out, following up. The more successfully the platform attracted new clients, the thicker her contact book got – and the more time it consumed.

In other words: the platform hadn't reduced the burden on a reputation-focused agent. It had multiplied it.

So the founder built a new product – which just launched, and which the new funding will support.

It's called Presence CRM, and its job is to surface hidden deals inside an agent's existing contact base, powered by an AI engine built specifically for that purpose.

The AI continuously monitors an agent's existing contacts – from their address book, from web and app inquiry forms, from their social media followers, and from their email history. Its goal: identify people who might be looking to buy or sell right now.

The key triggers are life events: job changes, relocations, shifts in financial position. The AI scans for these signals across the web, then ranks the contacts most worth reaching out to.

Like the original Luxury Presence, the CRM is optimized for luxury real estate – where a single discovered opportunity can generate a commission that more than justifies the time spent maintaining a broad network.

Simply put, Presence CRM is a dashboard that shows an agent each morning exactly who and what to focus on: current inquiries and active deals, plus newly surfaced opportunities flagged by the AI.

The AI can also draft outreach emails, log and transcribe calls, and pull a summary of every previous interaction with a contact – whether the AI surfaced that contact or the agent found them manually.

As Luxury Presence puts it: "Most CRMs are built to consume information from the agent. Presence CRM is built to feed information to the agent."

Bessemer Venture Partners is participating in its third consecutive Luxury Presence round. Bessemer is known for backing category-defining companies – Canva, Anthropic, DocuSign among them.

As Bessemer's representative put it: "We see Luxury Presence becoming not just a technology partner for agents but a category-defining platform – with clear potential to transform one of the world's largest and oldest industries."

03 /Opportunities

The most direct opportunity here is following Luxury Presence's own playbook: move from building a digital-presence tool to building a CRM that helps professionals work the contact base they've accumulated.

More broadly, the opportunity is building platforms that help people extract value from their existing relationships – across industries and in different ways.

Atrium ([covered here](/review/sila-v-shapochnyh-znakomyh)) raised $1.3M in December for a relationship maintenance platform aimed at investors, founders, and recruiters. The specific focus is "weak ties" – people you know peripherally – which are often the most valuable for unlocking unexpected opportunities.

The Swarm ([related review](/review/prodazhi-po-znakomstvu-mozhno-masshtabirovat)) raised $8M to map chains of connection between you and anyone you need to reach in a business context. Upload your contacts; the platform maps their contacts, and their contacts' contacts, and so on – building a graph of warm paths to any target.

Vaave ([covered previously](/review/okazyvaetsja-byvshie-jeto-ochen-poleznye-ljudi)) raised $753K to help universities maintain connections with alumni – and then expanded to sell the same platform to companies. The corporate version helps businesses stay in touch with former employees, tapping them as expert resources or re-hiring them when the right role opens.

The underexplored angle across all of these: which professional contexts accumulate the richest contact bases but have the least tooling for monetizing them? Real estate agents are an obvious answer. Trial lawyers, executive recruiters, and commercial bankers are less obvious ones – and likely more defensible.