VTS Raises Record-Breaking $55M Series-C
Bisnow partner VTS just raised $55M in a Series-C fundraising round, bringing the total value for the cloud-based leasing and portfolio management platform up to $200M. Not only is the massive round the largest-ever fundraising effort for a commercial real estate tech startup, but it also makes VTS one of the industry’s richest startups.
CEO Nick Romito says VTS has been able to achieve 100% year-over-year growth in the last few years, primarily in subscription fees from its impressive client list, which includes some of NYC’s biggest investors, landlords and property managers (SL Green, RXR Realty, CBRE, JLL, LaSalle Investment Management and many more.) The company is also rolling out a new product geared to tenant representation brokers and has even struck deals with market intelligence firms Compstak and S&P Capital IQ.
Nick believes it found a strategic investor in Insight Venture Partners—a NYC-based venture capital firm that mainly invests in growth-stage companies such as Zenefits, Alteryx and Wealth-X. VTS has given Insight Venture Partner’s Jason Ewell a seat on VTS’s board.
“We were blown away by how much Insight Venture Partners understood about what we were trying to accomplish along with the commercial real estate market,” Nick says. “We wanted to find the right partner that would support our vision, and the aggressive goals we have as a team. Trying to move the world’s second-largest asset class onto a single platform may sound scary to some investors. To Insight, it was exciting, and our numbers supported it was happening. They’re a great complement to our existing portfolio of investors and we couldn’t be more excited about the partnership.”
The round was also funded by OpenView Venture Partners—which led VTS’ $21M Series-B round in July—and Trinity Ventures. Over the multiple rounds, the firm has raised about $84M.
According to The Real Deal, the round is the one of the largest raised by a real estate tech startup, easily beating out Auction.com’s $50M from Google in 2014 and Cadre’s $50M from the Kushner brothers in January.
Nick told The Real Deal the capital will not only be used to fuel VTS’s global expansion into the EMEA and APAC markets (such as Germany, the Netherlands and Sydney, Australia), but it will also further develop the VTS platform and the company’s customer services capabilities.
“We want to be the one platform that everyone in the commercial real estate industry uses to manage their portfolios, track their deal flow and communicate with their peer set and partners,” Nick says. “By running their portfolios on VTS, our clients now understand their own data better than ever before, but are starving for a platform to help them understand how they’re doing compared to the rest of the market. VTS is the only company with the data, customer base and platform to execute on real-time benchmarking and competitive market analysis. In addition to advanced workflow products that our clients want to further run their business on VTS, we’ll be building an array of benchmarking and forecasting products for our clients to utilize. Eventually we want to do for commercial real estate what Bloomberg did for financial services.”
The 150-person company recently moved to a new 16k SF space at 114 W 41 St, but Nick said the company plans to double its headcount over the next year, which could mean a new office may be in the works.
The challenge now, Nick says, is to keep up its growth as it scales internationally.
“Financing can help propel us to be in that right place at the right time, achieving our goal to become the industry standard,” he told TechCrunch.
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