On Monday, Greensoil PropTech Ventures Fund, the $100 million VC fund that invests in early to midstage real estate technology (the sector known colloquially as PropTech) in North America, Europe and Israel, announced that it has launched a second LP fund. Initial closing of the fund represents about half of its $100 million target.
The fund has received an anchor investment from one of Canada’s largest pension investment managers, the Public Sector Pension Investment Board (PSP Investments), which manages just under $170 billion in pension contributions, including those from Canada’s federal Public Service, the Canadian Forces, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Reserve Force. PSP Investments invests globally in public financial markets, private equity, real estate, infrastructure, natural resources and credit instruments.
In addition to PSP, a number of new and returning investors from the real estate sector have signed on for the second fund, including an affiliate of Toronto’s Starlight Investments, a North American multi-family and Canadian commercial real estate company with $20 billion of assets under management.
The Fund’s mandate is to invest entirely in PropTech, leveraging its longstanding industry relationships, including many of its Limited Partners, to find and invest in technologies compelling to customers in the real estate sector. In many cases, prospective portfolio company solutions are piloted with one of Greensoil’s Limited Partners before the fund makes an investment.
“As leading industry experts, we have been profitably bringing innovation and sustainability to the built environment for decades,” said Alan Greenberg, Co-Founder and Chairman of Greensoil PropTech Ventures. “Our diverse experience as real estate owners, developers and venture investors gives us an advantage unmatched by generalist VC firms. This unique vantage point will allow us to lead the industry’s adoption of the next generation of technologies – what we call PropTech 2.0.”
“Significant opportunity and adversity”
“The initial closing of Greensoil PropTech Ventures Fund II comes at a time of significant opportunity and adversity for the real estate industry and the global economy and the need for innovation has never been greater,” said Kristopher Wojtecki, Managing Director, Real Estate Investments, PSP Investments. “PSP’s partnership with Greensoil, and anchor investment in Fund II, reflects our confidence in their PropTech leadership and investment track record.”
“At Starlight, we have been growing our real estate portfolio rapidly and sustainably to become the largest owner of rental units in Canada,” said Daniel Drimmer, Founder and CEO of Starlight Investments. “We are excited to partner with Greensoil PropTech Ventures to source, finance and deploy solutions into our buildings. We believe our commitment to GSPV Fund II will help us extend our market leadership and generate high investment returns.”
“From its origins of largely hardware-focused technologies to reduce facility operating costs, PropTech is exploding into a myriad of technologies, leveraging the cloud, machine learning and SaaS business models to provide real estate-specific use cases,” said David Harris Kolada, Managing Partner of Greensoil PropTech Ventures and fund manager of GSPV II. “With our new fund, we will be financing opportunities resulting from the digital disruption of the entire real estate value chain.” Joining GSPV in 2019, David brings a 25-year track record of investing and leading software and industrial technology companies.
In 2015, Greensoil launched one of the world’s first venture capital funds focused entirely on real estate technology. Current portfolio companies include sustainable concrete maker CarbonCure, home battery storage maker Electriq Power, and ThoughtWire, which develops digital twin applications for smart cities and connected buildings.
Since that time, PropTech has become one of the largest and fastest growing VC segments, with close to $25 billion of venture capital financing going to PropTech companies in 2020.
To date, real estate companies representing more than $5 trillion under management globally have made public net zero carbon commitments by 2030 and 2050. To help achieve these carbon reduction goals, GSPV says it will invest in high growth technology companies with an accretive business case to property owners, and strong environmental returns for the planet.
