Daily Briefing: PE firm Xander Investment buys office park for $130m; Proptech firm UrbanAgents raises $2m seed round

And government-backed LongHash first startups collectively raise $9.7m in Q1.

From DealStreetAsia:

Singapore’s Xander Investment Management on Thursday said it has acquired Weikfield IT Citi Info Park, an office park in Pune, for $178.93m (US$130m) as global investors deepen their presence in India’s expanding commercial office sector.

Xander has bought the 1.1 million sqft office park from private equity firm New Vernon Capital, which counts Maersk, WNS, Whirlpool, Nihilent and Tavisca Solutions among its tenants.

Xander Investment is the private equity real estate arm of The Xander Group, a global investment firm.

The transaction reaffirms a surge in interest among global institutional investors in acquiring office assets across India to capitalize on a steady performance by the commercial office sector.

Read more here.

From iCompareLoan:

UrbanAgents, a referral proptech firm that connects home sellers to a curated list of agents from various real estate agencies, has raised a $2m seed round from FarSight Capital, APAC Realty and angel investors.

With this funding, the startup hopes to use AI to set commission guide for home sellers connecting to top agents in Singapore. In general, the referral proptech firm only enrolls licensed agents deemed to be within the top 5% cohort based on past transaction and listing history data.

One of the services offered is UrbanZoon. In this service, which is currently available for HDB and Condo homeowners, the “Target Price” will be pegged to the home’s Zoom Value, which is calculated based on an AI model with inputs such as recent transactions, relevant listings and features specific to the unit as provided by the home seller.

Read more here.

From DealStreetAsia:

Singapore government-backed global blockchain incubator LongHash said its first cohort of startups have garnered a total of $13.4m (US$9.7m) between January and March this year. 

LongHash’s 12-week program programme was concluded after a global demo tour across Singapore, Shanghai, and Berlin. As many as five startups participated in it from Singapore, Taiwan and Germany. These include names such as Poseidon Network, T-RECs.ai, AlphaWallet, Keyless, and Lition.

LongHash is currently running the second batch that started in June and is slated to end this end. For its second batch, LongHash has tied up with Parity Technologies to support Polkadot, a blockchain protocol, which allows independent blockchain networks to exchange information and be protected with shared security.

Read more here.