Teachers are notoriously underpaid, and buying homes is notoriously expensive. This is where Landed, which just raised a $7.5 million Series A round led by Initialized Capital, comes in.

Landed helps educators buy homes by providing them with down-payment assistance. That’s because many teachers leave their jobs due to a lack of stable housing. In Berkeley, Calif., for example, more than half of the school district’s employees reported they considered leaving because of the high costs of housing.

“Our mission is to help these people build financial security and help them remain committed to their communities,” Landed co-founder Alex Lofton said. “We try to stay flexible to people’s realities. We don’t require people to buy in any particular city.”

To date, Landed has helped more than 200 educators buy homes in the San Francisco Bay Area, Denver and Seattle.

Currently, the maximum amount of support Landed gives is $120,000 in the Bay Area, but Lofton says people generally take less than that. Unlike some of the city-run housing programs, there’s no income restriction with Landed.

“A lot of people we work with make a bit too much money to qualify for those programs,” Lofton said.

Landed, which manages the funds it sets up, offers down-payment assistance in exchange for a cut of the home’s appreciated value. Landed, Inc., which is a licensed real estate brokerage, gets money on every transaction.

Given the influx of new cash into the SF Bay Area via IPOs from tech companies, Landed expects the market to become more challenging.

“With all of these economic booms in a market that’s already really supply-constrained with housing, it will be even more challenging,” he said.

While that’s surely discouraging to potential homebuyers, Landed is prepared to expand into additional markets and diversify where it offers support.

“[IPOs] will affect us but it won’t end our mission,” Lofton said. “For the community that we’re a part of, in our backyard, it does make us all here a bit nervous.”

With the funding, Landed will be able to expand to more cities and serve educators beyond K-12.

“I’ve followed the team at Landed for several years in their mission of providing more equitable access to homeownership to some of the most important community members – our educators and teachers,” Initialized Capital partner Kim Mai-Cutler* said in a statement. “Not only is Landed attacking a profound issue affecting teacher retention in metros and school districts throughout the country, this is a promising market opportunity to build a trusted brand and institution to help essential professionals achieve their lifetime financial goals.”

*Kim-Mai Cutler is a former colleague of mine, but this relationship had no bearing on coverage.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Landed raises .5 million Series A to help teachers buy homes

Lotame is unveiling what it says is a new approach to the data management business, with what it calls an “unstacked” strategy.

Adam Solomon, a former Time Inc. and Viacom executive who recently joined Lotame as chief marketing officer, said this new strategy is illustrated by the launch of Data Stream, which allows publishers and marketers to combine their first-party data with Lotame’s device graph connecting consumer data across devices.

The company offered these capabilities before, but Solomon said Data Stream allows Lotame to break it out as an individual product, separate from a larger data management platform.

“Very specifically, what we’re doing is decoupling products and services from the broader platform to solve business challenges for our customers,” said CEO Andy Monfried.

Solomon added that as Lotame customers face an increasingly complicated data landscape, the company has been doing more specialized work with individual clients. So it has created a product strategy (and catchy marketing term) based on that work.

“Now we’ve taken those bespoke, solutions-oriented features and productized them,” Solomon said. “Instead of a DMP, we really have an unbundled collection of technologies, where we can license individual components of our platform.”

Solomon said a DMP can basically be broken down into four areas: data ingestion at the center (that’s where Data Stream sits), audience segmentation, analytics and a data marketplace. The strategy is to create products focused on each of those areas.

Monfried contrasted this approach with the larger marketing clouds, which he said are trying to sell customers “the full stack of all their products.”

“What we say to clients is, ‘We don’t want to replace a full stack from Adobe or Salesforce it if makes sense [for] your business,’ ” he said. “But there are opportunities to augment, or specific tasks they need to solve for.”

In the announcement, IBM Audience Application Lead Tanya Cross described Lotame’s approach as “essential for a large global organization like ours,” adding, “It allows us to pick and choose the right tools for our data needs, giving us the ability to create more informed marketing campaigns and improve our business results.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Lotame pitches an ‘unstacked’ approach to selling data tools