The Shark and the startup: A deal that was worth taking a bit out of

Bricks and Agent, a scale up that developed an innovative and market leading property maintenance platform has welcomed Andrew Banks of Shark Tank as an investor into the platform.

Back in 2018 when Rafael and Jon agreed to a deal with Andrew on Shark tank, he recognised as a property owner, that property maintenance was traditionally disconnected and difficult for all stakeholders in the maintenance process and that there was a significant opportunity both domestically and internationally.

“It has been many years since I proposed to invest on Shark Tank. The deal didn’t go ahead at the time, but I stayed in touch with the team and have really enjoyed watching the progress of their business model, client base and lists of achievements. Their product is disrupting the status quo of property maintenance, which is clunky, labour intensive and frustrating for all parties to the maintenance transaction. The client list in both Australia and internationally is impressive and now the platform has over 380k users which is great” Says Andrew.

Bricks and Agent was founded in December 2016 by two experienced entrepreneurs: Rafael Niesten and Jon Stul who have known each other since they were 5 years old. Rafael had the tech experience whilst Jon had a background in real estate.

There are 2.7 maintenance jobs on average per residential property that come with more than 20 manual touch points resulting in more than 5,400 touch points on a residential portfolio of just 100 properties. The platform which is built on smarts and automation significantly reduced down the number of touch points saving 40+% of time in dealing with maintenance.

“We really enjoyed our time on Shark Tank and the outcome for the business post appearance was great. We stayed in touch with Andrew over the years keeping him up to date with our progress. When the time was right to complete our first capital raise, we felt it would be great to have Andrew onboard, and he said yes, again” says Rafael Niesten, Bricks and Agents Co Founder. “Andrew is highly connected in many industries and it is great to finally welcome him onboard all these years later, to help with our expansion domestically as well as internationally.”

About Bricks and Agent

Bricks + Agent specialises in property maintenance and workflow software for residential, commercial and strata sectors. The solution has desktop, mobile, omni channel options as well as bot options, plus an integrated smart lock solution. It is a true cloud solution hosted with Microsoft Azure. The key targets of the solution are property software integration partners, property managers, building managers, facilities managers, strata managers, trades, property owners and tenants.

There are more than 380,000 users on the platform from some of the largest property managers in Australia and globally.