MetaProp raises $100m for largest global seed fund

The venture capital firm has closed its third fund after raising $100m – the largest global seed fund yet for property innovation.

Backed by the likes of CBRE, PGIM, Cushman & Wakefield and JLL Spark, the oversubscribed MetaProp Fund III is two and a half times larger than its predecessor, Fund II, which raised $40m in 2018.

For this fundraise, MetaProp also tapped into investment from across the globe, including Canada’s Ivanhoe Cambridge, the Development Bank of Japan and Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Bank in Japan, Swire Properties in Hong Kong and China and Jakarta Setiabudi International in Indonesia.

Startups in property raised more than $23.7bn in venture capital investment last year, a trend MetaProp will continue to harness as the industry becomes ever more digital.

MetaProp Fund III’s first investments were:

• Proper.ai: a startup promising “accurate, reliable, flexibly-priced” accounting and bookkeeping based on machine learning for property managers
• Ergeon: aiming to build the “largest, most customer-friendly” construction company in the world, Ergeon provides installation services for residential and commercial properties
• GoFor: a last mile, on-demand and same-day delivery service for North American businesses that provides tools to track delivery end-to-end
• Dongnae: a service for South Korea’s real estate market that has created a centralised platform for brokers in what is otherwise a fragmented market
• HighArc: an automated, all-in-one web platform for homebuilders
• Milo Credit: a digital banking and lending startup that offers US home loans to foreign nationals

To date, MetaProp has invested in more than 130 early stage tech companies worldwide.

Sara Hankm, head of innovation at PGIM Real Estate, said: “As an important part of scaling our own global innovation strategy, our partnership with MetaProp accelerates our ability to stay ahead of the curve in technology advancements and identify the likely winners among the myriad of proptech startups.”

Zach Aarons, co-founder and general partner of MetaProp, said: “Proptech is increasingly important during these Covid-19 pandemic times, the associated global economic recovery and workers going back to the office. Real estate practitioners have changed the way they value technology and innovation. What was previously a ‘nice-to-have’ has turned into a ‘must-have’, especially for multinational and regional industry leaders.”

Outside Fund III, MetaProp is gearing up for its latest accelerator programme at Columbia University. Applications for participants are open until the end of July, and the company recently announced its three anchor startups.