• Ryan Serhant's firm raised $45 million from Camber Creek and Left Lane Capital.
• Much of the money will go toward growing the firm's AI platform, S.mple.
• S.mple isn't Serhant's first app. He told BI how he turned past failures into success.

Despite Ryan Serhant's standout 2024, he hasn't escaped failure. After creating two apps that ultimately faltered, he's on to his third, raising millions to help catapult it to success.

In December, the real-estate mogul announced that his brokerage firm, Serhant, had raised $45 million in its first equity funding round from the capital firms Camber Creek and Left Lane Capital.

His firm, which he founded in 2020, also increased its year-over-year sales volume by over $1 billion, its annual letter said. In June, Serhant, who starred on Bravo's "Million Dollar Listing New York," debuted his own Netflix show, "Owning Manhattan," which was greenlighted for a second season.

Traditional brokerage firms aren't typically venture-backed. Serhant told Business Insider that much of the VC funding the firm raised would go toward growing its AI-powered app, S.mple.

As its name implies, S.mple is designed to simplify brokers' administrative work as independent contractors, allowing more time for selling real estate.

Serhant told CNBC last month that the firm's nearly 1,000 agents had been using the app, which launched last January, and that it had saved the firm more than the equivalent of 625 working days in admin time.

S.mple, available only to Serhant agents, allows agents to manage contracts, marketing materials, sales follow-ups, customer-relationship-management metrics, and more from their phones. It's designed to streamline those processes, taking over much of the administrative side of the work.

"It's Instacart for salespeople," Serhant told BI. "It's the least sexy part of what we do."

Contrary to the app's name, the road to launching it was far from simple. Two previous app ventures, Univers, a real-estate brokerage in the metaverse, and Spaces, a video-editing tool, failed to take off as Serhant hoped. But he wasn't deterred.

Serhant broke down his missteps for BI and explained how he learned from his mistakes.

Listen to what people are asking for, not what you imagine they need

In 2022, Serhant launched Univers, a headquarters for his namesake brokerage in the metaverse that allowed teams anywhere in the world to meet.

Its futuristic virtual office tower was populated with robots, agent avatars, and elevators that moved like spaceships.

It might've been eye-catching, but Serhant said agents didn't find it as useful as he had envisioned. Features like the ability to choose their avatars' hair color or wardrobe weren't helping agents close deals in the real world.

"It didn't actually solve any immediate problems for them," he said.

Serhant realized the same was true for Spaces, a video-editing app he created in 2022 to help sellers' agents design virtual tours and marketing materials.

Serhant saw the potential, but the agents did not. They were more likely to use existing apps and tools they were comfortable with.

"The biggest lesson was don't just give customers what you think they need," Serhant said. "A lot of times it's just about really asking and listening to direct feedback."

He added that the roadblocks Univers and Spaces faced helped him learn about the app-development world.

Serhant said that now he's comfortable interviewing engineers and developers and discussing how they develop models or use machine-learning technologies.

"I didn't know what to ask before," Serhant said. "I didn't know what I didn't know."

He said he persevered because he believes that making useful tech for real-estate agents is good business. He compared his app-development journey to a lawnmower that doesn't start immediately.

"You have to figure out how to get it going," Serhant said.