Luxury Presence recently surpassed $100 million in annual recurring revenue. Less than 2% of venture-backed software companies reach this milestone. And the Austin-based company currently serves more than 100,000 agents across nearly 20,000 real estate companies.
This milestone comes on the heels of a $37 million funding round, led by Bessemer Venture Partners for the third time and closed in January 2026, and the launch of a new Presence platform that consolidates real estate agents’ customer-facing businesses into a single system.
Since the beginning of 2025, Luxury Presence has grown its AI product and engineering team by more than 300% and says it is now releasing new features five times faster than it was 12 months ago. The company was founded in 2016 by CEO Marte Kramer and has raised a total of $89 million from investors including Bessemer, Zillow co-founder Spencer Rascoff, and real estate coach Tom Ferry.
Inman recently had the opportunity to meet with Kramer, in which he explained what’s driving Luxury Presence’s AI-powered product push and where he sees the industry heading.
The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Inman: We recently wrote about your company and its milestone of reaching $100 million in annual recurring revenue. Only 2% of VC-backed software companies reach that milestone, but you started doing it about 10 years ago. When you started, did you believe you would get there or was this a surprise to you as well?
Malte Kramer: To be honest, I didn’t think much about it. When I joined the company, I wanted to build a successful company. I really liked the real estate industry, and I thought it was a big enough business to build, but I didn’t think about 10 years from now. It was really just a thing. Can we build a product that people find useful, find product-market fit, and get our first few customers? That was our main focus in the beginning.
Once we raised our first round of venture funding, we needed to think more about our long-term vision. Venture capitalists are very interested in what your company will look like in five years, 10 years, and how you can grow it 10x, 100x. So we needed to be clear about what kind of company we were building and how it could become very large. But that was until a few years later.
What do you think has been the driving force behind the company’s success over the past 10 years?
The first is a radical focus on the customer. We have always said that the customer comes first. We’ve listened to them, learned from them, truly understood their business, and tried to walk in their shoes. When I first started, I spent countless hours with clients, going to their listing appointments, observing how assistants used the MLS, and sitting behind clients looking over their shoulders. It remains part of the culture we built.
The second is a very high bar for talent. We found some great people on the engineering side. A strong technical force with a team of over 100 engineers, product managers, and designers.
And third, which was a bit unusual at the time, we started at the top of the market. Many companies that have pursued this field have tried to venture into the low-end or mid-market, but it is very difficult to break into the high-end market in our industry. While many of our competitors try to sell to brokers first, we decided to go after the highest performing agents and teams and contact them directly.
It’s difficult to communicate directly to agents at first, but you’ll only succeed when agents actually use your product and find value in it. So we had to build a really good product. It was difficult at first, but it ended up being a huge benefit. We currently have 20,000 customers, many of whom are individual agents and teams, but we also provide brokerage services.
Approximately 30% of our customers are top production agents. Is your strategy going forward to continue tracking these agents or to broaden your base?
We are certainly best known for our services to top agents, which is why we call it “Luxury Presence.” But our customers are in markets all over the United States, and it’s not just the high-end or luxury markets. We have customers in areas where the average home price is $300,000. They come to us wanting to express themselves in a professional, sharp and aesthetically appealing way.
The reality is that most agents want to operate at a higher price point, regardless of what market they are in. We’ve seen clients seek us out from all kinds of markets to help agents do that. We don’t exclude anyone.
What we can say is that we tend to focus on full-time agents, meaning dedicated people. It’s okay even if you are new to this industry. We can still cooperate with them. But we would like to work with someone full time.
You’ve called the new Presence platform the most significant product evolution in the company’s history. Is this a planned evolution or has something happened in the market to prompt faster action?
Kramer: That was the plan, and it was the AI and the way we used it internally that made it possible. You can now build much faster than before. We were able to compress a one- or two-year roadmap into about nine months.
We’ve also heard from many of our customers that they don’t want to use 10 different logins. They want fewer tools with more features. And we always felt that one of the missing components of our platform was CRM. This was a big release.
The goal was to bring everything customer-facing – advertising, social, SEO, website, email, database engagement – in one place, and bring it all together on one platform, branded and easy to use for agents.
It started by asking customers what they were missing and what they wanted. As a result, we were able to identify the three or four features that we thought would be most valuable and quickly start building them.
Since the beginning of last year, our AI product and engineering teams have grown significantly. Is this new platform really the only one that justifies an investment of that size?
There it is. We’re seeing clear ROI from the products we build for our customers and our investments in AI from feedback and adoption. There is clearly a desire and a real need for them in the market.
But internally, we’ve invested heavily in our AI infrastructure, the operations team we’ve built, and the AI engineers we’ve brought in, particularly Claude. We keep spending because we are getting ROI.
We’re building better things three to four times faster than we were nine to 12 months ago. It’s easy to say things are going well so let’s keep investing.
How is the company running now compared to when it was founded?
The jobs are very different. Initially, as a founder, you are responsible for everything.
The first year was spent doing customer service, client onboarding, sales, working directly with engineers, and designing the first version of the product. you do everything. And over time, you will start to employ yourself from each job. Pick the thing you’re the worst at and least want to do, find and train people who are really good at it, and repeat until you finally have a whole leadership team.
Now my work is much less reactive than it used to be. At that time, all fires [mine] To put out. Now my work is more active and long-term. I don’t really think about what’s going to happen this week. Most of that is handled by my team.
We’re thinking about what’s going to happen over the next six, 12, 24 months. Lots of strategic work, time with clients, board management, fundraising.
And then you manage your team and make sure they’re clear about where you’re going as a company. When you have more than 500 employees, that alone becomes almost a full-time job. I’m the Chief Iteration Officer. We reiterate what we aspire to, keep our standards high and communicate our vision. That’s really the most important thing right now.
There is a huge discussion in the industry about AI and how it will impact real estate agents. Will it shrink or expand their role over time, or do you think it will just split things up between agents who use it and those who are left behind?
AI will do some of the tasks currently done by real estate agents, or by people they employ, such as assistants or deal managers. But I don’t think it will ever get all the work done. I think the human relations aspect of being a real estate agent will become more valuable, not less.
I also don’t think the idea that agents using AI are suddenly dramatically more competitive than agents without AI is actually not true. What makes a good real estate agent great will continue to be very important. While AI can save time and relieve repetitive tasks, I don’t think it will fundamentally change what it means to be a real estate agent.
As more things in our daily lives become automated and more transactional, I think humans will seek more human connection. Let’s think about teachers. Just because AI can teach children well doesn’t mean we won’t need human teachers anymore. The same goes for therapists. The same goes for lawyers. And the same is true for real estate, most consumers.
There may be exceptional people who want to solve things themselves, and AI will be a tool for that. But I think that’s a minority.
So I think the best agents will be powered by AI. I don’t see it as a threat like some people do. If you’ve ever worked with a great agent, it’s impossible for an AI to replicate more than half of what that agent did. Convincing someone off the shelf at 11 p.m., closing a deal that never quite closes, these things require a lot of nuance. It’s a very complicated job.
There’s an interesting backstory. You grew up in Germany, came to the United States on a basketball scholarship, and earned your MBA from Stanford. Out of all of these, which one do you think has shaped the way you build and run your company more than people expect?
I learned a lot about teamwork as a basketball player. It’s about committing to a big goal with your team, delaying gratification, doing the hard work in pursuit of something, and finding joy in the process. So I learned a lot about team building and leadership from basketball.
But it was my two years at Stanford Business School that inspired me the most. I’m from a small town in Germany. There were no entrepreneurs around me. People there tend to take the safe route. There are no real examples of founders.
Coming to California, coming to Silicon Valley, being exposed to that environment, being around people with really big ideas, I initially thought you guys are crazy that you can build a huge company at 22 years old.
However, being around him changed my way of thinking. I met more and more people who inspired me and helped me understand that I wanted to be an entrepreneur and how to do it successfully.
I think the Silicon Valley mindset, its optimism, and the networks, investors, and other founders opening doors were also the biggest influences.
Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Luxury Presence was currently in the midst of fundraising.
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