Naperville-based Cartavi just completed a successful first round of venture capital funding, and we spoke with co-founder and CEO Glenn Shimkus for his thoughts.
By Peter Ricci
Real estate news feeds, including Crain’s and Inman News, reported yesterday that Naperville-based tech firm Cartavi has completed a successful Series A round of venture capital funding, with such investors as I2A Fund, Firestarter, OCA Ventures and New World Ventures getting in on the early-stage investments.
It’s good news for Cartavi, a cloud-based storage app for real estate agents that has earned high praise from some of the industry’s most tech-savvy professionals, and for some additional perspective on the successful funding, we reached out to Glenn Shimkus, Cartavi’s co-founder and CEO, for his perspective.
Cartavi CEO Glenn Shimkus – Funds for Investment, Expansion
The venture capital funds, Shimkus told us, will go towards continued investment and expansion for the firm.
“The investment we just announced allows us to continue to invest in our product to ensure that we can provide a solution that is simple, mobile and secure,” Shimkus said. “It also allows us to expand our operations to support the exceptional demand that we are seeing in the market for our product.”
According to recent data from the company, Cartavi has seen an 85 percent increase in iPad usage the last 60 days.
Shimkus also said that the venture capital will contribute to the central purpose of Cartavi – to offering paperless solutions to agents.
“Ultimately, as a result of this investment we believe we are better positioned to deliver a solution that will provide the efficiencies that paperless solutions promise to bear, the ability to deliver an exceptional customer experience by having a solution that supports them while they are on the go and to close more transactions faster,” Shimkus told us.
Accolades for Cartavi
Cartavi has been compared to Dropbox because of its storage capabilities, but it goes one-step further with DocuSign integration, which allows all the various parties in a real estate transaction to access and sign documents on the go, whether by iPhone, iPad or Android platforms. And so far, the response to Cartavi has been extremely positive; as Shimkus himself noted, the app was spotlighted in our latest tech issue.
“While we are honored to be receiving the accolades that we have been receiving from our users and the press – including being named “The best app for storing, signing and sending documents” by Chicago Agent magazine – there is so much more that we can and should deliver,” he said.