Before Luxury Presence had a platform, it had five customers. No code. No feature list pretending to be a vision. Malte Kramer carried website mockups into meetings with prominent real estate agents, showed them what their names might look like online and asked for a setup fee. Five people paid. Then he went away and built what they had bought.
It is the sort of origin story that acquires polish with repetition, except its useful detail is the lack of polish. Kramer had already made the opposite mistake. As a college student he and a friend created Heartbroker, a dating marketplace meant to reward people for setting up their friends. They built before they knew whether the machinery of the idea would turn. It did not. His next venture, the nonprofit fundraising app Givrr, raised money from friends and family but failed to find enough traction; another company eventually acquired its technology.
Two false starts left behind two clean lessons. Test the difficult assumption before spending heavily on technology. Solve a pain people already feel instead of asking them to adopt an elaborate new behavior. Luxury Presence would be the exam.
A scorer who kept the books balanced
Kramer grew up in Freiburg, Germany, and joined a basketball team at 12. By 16 he was playing professionally in Germany. At 19, a scholarship brought him to California, where the ocean was bright, the distances were enormous and his next decade was waiting without the courtesy of an introduction.
At Cuesta College he became one of the program’s notable scorers: 1,092 career points, a school career record for three-point percentage and a 4.0 grade-point average. He transferred to Pepperdine, wore number 44 and played forward at 6-foot-6. In 2014, he became the men’s basketball program’s first Capital One/CoSIDA Academic All-American. He also graduated as co-valedictorian with a degree in economics.
The neatness of those achievements conceals the jostle required to hold them together. Practices, travel and games are jealous calendar owners. Kramer later wrote Play for Something, a guide for student-athletes covering study, memory, writing, networking and the identity that remains when the uniform comes off. Its premise was practical: ambition in one arena need not evict ambition from another.
“I learned a lot about teamwork from being a basketball player.”Malte Kramer, reflecting on leadership in 2026
One Pepperdine ritual stayed with him. Before and after practice, the players gathered at the tip of the center circle with both feet inside. A foot outside earned a correction from the coach. Kramer did not fully understand the fuss at the time. As a CEO, he came to see the circle as a compact model of commitment. One half-present person changes the effort of everyone nearby.
The apprenticeship hidden inside a favor
After Pepperdine, Kramer stayed in California. Stanford Graduate School of Business followed, but the decisive education arrived in a Beverly Hills real estate office. In 2015, agent Jade Mills, a friend, asked him to help with digital marketing. Kramer proposed a trade: he would improve the operation’s online presence if he could become a fly on the wall.
He went to listing appointments. He watched assistants work with the multiple listing service. He looked over shoulders and saw the improvisation required to connect a fragmented collection of tools. The industry fascinated him because every agent was, in effect, an entrepreneur. Their names were brands; their relationships were inventory; their phones rarely respected dinner.
Agents described an absurd choice. A website could be elegant but commercially sleepy, or it could generate leads while looking too clumsy to put on a business card. Kramer’s opening idea was simply to refuse the tradeoff. Luxury Presence would combine the visual standards expected in high-end property marketing with the search, data and conversion machinery required to produce business.
Starting with demanding agents made the first sale harder. It also made vagueness expensive. Kramer chose to sell directly to agents rather than win a brokerage contract and hope its people used the product. The approach forced the software to prove itself at the individual desk. Jade Mills became the first client and, later, an investor.
Learning to leave every job
In the first year, Kramer did customer support, client onboarding, sales and product design, while working directly with engineers. Founder mythology likes this stage because it is cinematic: late nights, heroic improvisation, one person answering every bell. Kramer’s description of what comes next is less flattering and more grown-up. You hire yourself out of each job. Start with the work you dislike and perform least well. Find someone excellent, help that person take ownership, repeat.
Luxury Presence reached $1 million in annual revenue before accepting venture money. That patience was partly philosophical and partly scar tissue. Paying customers made a more honest argument than a deck. The company announced a $5.4 million Series A in 2020, followed by later rounds. In January 2026 it raised $22 million in Series C equity led by Bessemer Venture Partners and secured a $15 million debt facility from J.P. Morgan. Investors across its history have included Mills, Zillow co-founder Spencer Rascoff, real estate coach Tom Ferry, NFL player Larry Fitzgerald and Dirk Nowitzki, whom Kramer named as his favorite player back in college.
By June 2026, the company reported $100 million in annual recurring revenue, more than 100,000 agents served across nearly 20,000 real estate businesses, and $89 million raised in total. Numbers from fast-growing companies date quickly; these belong to that moment. The more durable measure is the expanding problem the company chose to own. Websites became search, ads, social tools, mobile products, lead nurturing, listing presentations and a CRM.
“I’m the chief repetition officer.”Kramer on leading a company of more than 500 people
His current job is no longer to answer every alarm. It is to make the future legible: six months, twelve months, two years. He spends time with customers, the board and the leadership team, repeating the direction until hundreds of people can make decisions without asking him to make each one. The title “chief repetition officer” is funny because repetition is unglamorous. It is also how a company avoids becoming a federation of private interpretations.
The same plainness appears in how he talks about hiring. A résumé records what happened; it does not reveal how a person uses authority or handles friction. One of Kramer’s favored questions for leadership candidates asks for a time they advocated for a direct report to be promoted. The answer moves attention away from the candidate’s rehearsed triumphs and toward the people around them. He has also argued that unconventional résumés deserve a serious reading, pointing to strong employees who skipped college or left it early. Credentials impressed the valedictorian, presumably. They simply did not excuse him from looking for evidence.
Listening, in his account, is not the ceremonial focus group at the end of a roadmap. It is fieldwork. Early on, he sat near customers while they used software and watched the hesitations that would never appear in a survey response. Years later, as product and engineering grew beyond one hundred people, he still named customer focus first when asked what drove the company. The habit matters because software businesses can become exquisitely good at measuring themselves. Revenue, retention and shipping speed are crisp. The customer’s wasted Tuesday afternoon is not. Someone has to go looking for it.
More machinery, more room for people
The latest version of Kramer’s original argument is built around artificial intelligence. Luxury Presence introduced AI marketing specialists for work such as search optimization, advertising and lead nurturing, then assembled a broader Presence Platform with an AI CRM. The idea is to replace a thicket of logins with one system that notices signals, suggests outreach and handles repetitive tasks.
Kramer does not speak as if automation will turn an agent into an unnecessary ceremonial figure. He argues that real estate’s relational work grows more valuable as routine transactions become automated. Software may draft the note or spot the dormant contact. It cannot easily calm a frightened client at 11 p.m., repair a deal with several offended parties or understand the family argument happening underneath a negotiation.
There is a pleasing symmetry here. Kramer’s company now analyzes behavior at a scale unimaginable when he sat behind assistants watching them click through an MLS. Yet his method still begins with attention. Customers asked for fewer tools. Agents needed more time. The technology earned its place by taking the dull work and leaving the delicate work to people.
At college, both feet had to be inside the circle. In a startup, five customers had to put money behind a promise. In a mature company, hundreds of employees need the same clear direction. Kramer’s career has been built around these small proofs of commitment. The scale changed. The test did not.
Continue exploring