Courtesy of Tishman Speyer
Tishman Speyer, one of the world’s biggest developers, owns and is headquartered in Rockefeller Center.
Tishman Speyer is doubling down on its commitment to proptech, launching a venture capital fund with $100M in commitments and a goal of raising up to $150M in equity to fund investments.
The fund will focus on emerging firms able to work with Tishman Speyer’s global assets and networks, the Rockefeller Center-based company announced this week.
“This is an exciting moment for real estate, an industry that will be transformed by cutting-edge innovation,” Tishman Speyer CEO Rob Speyer said in a statement. “The Proptech Venture Fund gives Tishman Speyer the opportunity to help shape and accelerate this ongoing transformation by championing the next generation of innovators.”
The New York-based global developer has been investing in proptech companies since 2017, funding companies like VTS, OpenSpace and Agora. Tishman Speyer’s new fund allows it to leverage its knowledge and resources to grow companies capable of disrupting the current proptech market, it said in the release.
“Tishman Speyer is uniquely positioned to understand, pilot and power the growth of the world’s most promising Proptech companies,” Tishman Speyer Senior Managing Director of Proptech Jenny Wong said in a statement. “As one of the first firms to embrace Proptech as a tool to improve the customer experience and then as an investor, we have developed the insight and organizational infrastructure to serve as a valued thought partner, mentor, customer and accelerator.”
Tishman Speyer has since further enmeshed itself in the market, launching two special-purpose acquisition companies to identify proptech companies to take public. Its first, which launched with a $300M IPO, merged with building access and software firm Latch, valuing the company at roughly $1.5B. Latch has lost more than half its value since the merger.
Tishman Speyer Acquisition Corp. II debuted a month later, in February 2021, and raised $250M. It has yet to identify a merger target.
Tishman Speyer’s fund comes at a pivotal moment for proptech, as startups manage to scale successfully and companies including Cushman & Wakefield, CBRE and JLL increasingly pour money into proptech funds like MetaProp and Fifth Wall.
Venture capital funding is also returning to proptech after investments slumped during the pandemic. Despite plummeting by approximately $10B from 2019 to 2020, investments soared up to pre-pandemic levels in 2021 and should keep climbing in 2022, according to research from the Center for Real Estate Technology & Innovation.
Investments largely focused on companies looking at tenant experience, iBuying, customer relationship management, data and analytics, and flex solutions in 2021, but are poised to shift to less crowded niches this year, CRETI’s survey found. Respondents said they expected investment to shift away from residential and toward commercial, and 71% voiced interest in decarbonization solutions.
“2022 will see commercial real estate adopting innovations that have been proven out in residential over the last 3 to 5 years,” Fifth Wall Vice President Sarah Liu wrote in CRETI’s survey. “There is now a cohort of players who are developing either ‘lighter’ software that is easier to adopt, or B2B tech-enabled services that enable leaner SMBs to compete with enterprise peers with much larger technology and R&D budgets.”
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