Searches set to be revolutionised as Martello (formerly MyNestBox) gathers momentum.

MyNestBox, a digital platform and API that connects thousands of data sources to speed up home buying, has raised a £1.3 million seed round led by Fuel Ventures, alongside backing from numerous property law firms. MyNestBox features interactive and data-led on-demand “searches” for property lawyers. “Searches” are currently supplied as large PDF documents containing all the information a home buyer (and their lender) need to know, such as flood risk, subsidence, coal mining, and public rights of way. Since launching in beta, MyNestBox on the other hand supplies the data instantly to the lawyer. MyNestBox have letters of intent exceeding £1 million annually, to be realised in 2023.

The platform was co-founded by proptech and software entrepreneurs Henry Crosby PhD. and Adam Rogers. Henry, who is the company’s founder and CEO, says the idea for MyNestBox was prompted after he bought his first home, which took 6 months from offer to completion. Henry knew that his experience working for Proptech start-ups could overcome a significant chunk of this. He met Adam in 2020. With Adam’s personal experience of buying a home being no better, as well as his years of building products on the internet, he was immediately taken with Henry’s vision.

Whilst speaking with Henry, he said “property lawyers are in tight supply, and many law firms are reluctantly turning away business daily, because they are struggling to recruit new talent. As a result, this means that some law firms are looking at ways to use technology to increase their capacity, whilst maintaining or improving service. By supplying this data instantly, and in a more meaningful format than ever before, we are enabling, for some law firms, a 40% increase in capacity.”

In terms of the new funding, Henry says that MyNestBox plans to use it to bring on additional team members, and to take their first iteration of the product to market in Q1 2023.

It takes less than an hour to buy shares on the stock market. But it takes 5 and a half months to buy a home, from offer to completion.

Transactions are completed by property (“conveyancing”) lawyers who are expected to collect a huge amount of data to evidence their duty of care for their clients, and their client’s lenders.

This would be okay if the data that underpins the home buying market wasn’t such a mess. The most painful example of this is the (sometimes) 12 week wait for “searches”, which is a baffling 100+ page suite of PDFs commissioned by the buyer’s lawyer, to tell the home buyer everything that they really need to, but don’t want to know about their potential home, such as underlying radioactive gases, Flood Risk, Adopted Roads, and subsidence.

Martello solves this problem by processing “search” data everywhere, all the time, to maintain the first live property constraints database for home buying. Their platform will automatically collect 10,000+ datasets across 700 data sources and process it against all 30 million properties in England and Wales instantly.

Dr Henry Crosby PhD is a Geospatial Data Scientist. He has spent 10 years contributing to the development of many products in the Proptech sector including at Nimbus Maps and Carterwood Analytics. His published authorship regularly discusses property data aggregation, including writing about the development of a state-of-the-art automated valuation model for UK residential properties.

Adam Rogers is an experienced entrepreneur and software engineer of 15+ years, in that time he led projects for the likes of Channel 4, as well as several exited spin outs from digital agency, Mint Digital. Previously he was the solo founder of DeskBeers, an enterprise beer on demand delivery start-up.