Zavvie, a brokerage-branded marketplace solution that connects broker-agents to verified homebuyers, announced hiring former engineering leader at Alexa AI and AWS AI, Venkatesh Baglodi, as its Chief Technology Officer (CTO), according to a press release.
Baglodi said that the zavvie marketplace’s ability to rapidly scale was a key reason for him joining as CTO. Before his role at AWS AI, he acted as senior technology leader at Amazon Prime, spent seven years as principle architecture/development manager at AT&T, led R&D for three years at McKesson Provider Technologies (Change Healthcare) and six years at UPS as lead systems architect/technical manager.
“There are more than 100,000 real estate brokers in the U.S. and 1.52 million Realtors. With a highly scalable business strategy, a talented team of smart, motivated people, and a collective real estate business acumen, zavvie is positioned for great success,” Baglodi stated in the release.
Zavvie currently has over 65,000 real estate agents across 47 states on its platform. By giving them easy-to-use tools, technology, training, marketing and strategy guides, it hopes to modernize brokerages and enable agents to stay at the center of the evolving real estate landscape.
“Ven is a seasoned leader with deep experience in building artificially intelligent platforms. A creator of large-scale data and applied science solutions, he brings to zavvie three decades of diverse industry experience from a wide range of industries: e-commerce and banking and finance, telecommunications and logistics,” stated Lane Hornung, cofounder and CEO of zavvie.
“This is a huge catch for zavvie; 2022 is the year when leveraging data will help us better serve our clients and rapidly expand our nationwide footprint,” Hornung said.
Venkatesh’s education includes a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Nova Southeastern University, an M.S. degree from Southern Polytechnic State University and a B.S. degree from the Institution of Engineers (India).
In other recent proptech news, construction proptech OpenSpace reached a $902 million valuation following a $102 million Series D funding round. MIT and La Haus also announced a joint research agreement to analyze and solve Latin America’s housing gap.