Reonomy hires Shutterstock’s VP of tech Chris Fischer

Real estate research and data startup Reonomy, which raised $13 million in a Series B round in January, has now wooed one of Shutterstock’s top technology executives to head up its engineering efforts, The Real Deal has learned.

Chris Fischer, who was vice president of technology operations at the image-sharing giant, will oversee design of Reonomy’s products and help the two-year-old startup scale. “Being able to build an early-stage company, with an exciting vision in a pretty cool space — that’s not a job to me,” Fischer said in an interview Wednesday, referring to his decision to leave a behemoth with a market cap of $2.54 billion for a startup.

In classic Valley-speak — or, shall we say, Alley-speak — Fischer added that apart from his technical chops, he would be able to share a lot of lessons he learned through failures.

“I’ve got a lot of scar tissue from working on multiple startups,” he said, including cloud computing firm Reality Check Network(now DigitalOcean) and Beatport, an online mecca for electronic music enthusiasts.

“Given that at the core we’re a tech and data company, there is no better guy I can think of than Chris to help us grow,” said Richard Sarkis, CEO and co-founder of Reonomy. “I really see him as a peer and thought partner.

Sarkis founded Reonomy in April 2013 along with Charlie Oshman. The firm collects and crunches data from hundreds of public databases to give users granular information on properties and a high-level snapshot of the competitive landscape. Brokerages such as JLL and Meridian Capital Group are clients, as are local investment firms such as Benchmark Real Estate Group and many major lenders.

Reonomy has raised just shy of $20 million from investors including Bain Capital Ventures and Richard and Stephen Mack. Sarkis said that the startup will be expanding to Los Angeles next quarter, and is also working on a product geared toward real estate investors.