CBRE Leads Latest Funding Round For VTS

Proptech firm VTS added more than $125 million in an E-round, according to a press release, to reach a total of $462.4 million by the count of startup data analyst Crunchbase. Leading the round with $100 million of capital was existing investor and customer CBRE Group. Other investors include BentallGreenOak, AmTrust, Brookfield Ventures, and Insight Venture Partners.

“This latest funding round, in addition to a debt facility we put in place a few months ago, unlocks over $275 million of new capital in 2022 alone,” wrote CEO Nick Romito in a blog post. The debt financing of $150 million came from Canadian-based CIBC Innovation Banking. This fifth venture round comes about three years since the company last raised capital by selling equity.

“In addition to CBRE’s capital investment, we’re excited to partner with them to roll out VTS as the agency leasing and property management platform of choice for their operations, initially in the U.S., with plans to expand usage of VTS to their operations in other regions and asset classes globally,” Romito added.

In a video on the post, he said, “This is not just a win for VTS. This is a win for all commercial real estate tech, which not that long ago was not exciting to any institutional investors.” Romito further said that the investment meant that proptech has “arrived as a real technology category.” Although, it perhaps might have been more accurate to say that proptech had already arrived as a major option for the largest investors.

According to Romito, the new round of investment is important to help fund development of new products that will be announced at some time in the future. He didn’t indicate specifics of what they might be. There are currently four major products that cover managing a portfolio of leases, creating tenant experiences, a predictive market research program based on $200 billion of leasing deals managed in VTS, and marketing content creation and deployment.

VTS claims that “19 of the 20 largest global asset managers” use its platform to one degree or another, and that “300,000 tenant companies are managed throughout the platform.” More than 87,000 office, retail, industrial, and multifamily properties are managed on its products across more than 40 countries. VTS says that comes to $80 billion in assets under management.