VTS, a commercial leasing and asset management platform for landlords and brokerage houses, today announced it has raised a $ 55 million Series C financing round led by Insight Venture Partners. Previous investors OpenView and Trinity Ventures also participated. This round brings VTS’s total funding to $ 84 million to date and makes it one of the best-funded tech companies in its vertical.
VTS’s services are currently used to manage around 2.7 billion square feet of real estate, and the company claims to have around 80% of the world’s top 10 investment managers on its platform. VTS founder and CEO (and former pro surfer) Nick Romito told me his business is now growing 100 percent year over year.
Using VTS, owners can track rental trends in their properties, track negotiations, and monitor their marketing performance, among other things. Likewise, brokers can use company tools to manage their own rental pipelines, while tenant representatives can manage their workflow on the platform as well.
The company said it plans to use the new funding to fuel its global expansion and work on its product. Romito tells me that VTS plans to expand into the EMEA and APAC markets, starting with Germany and the Netherlands, as well as Sydney, Australia.
When it comes to product innovation, Romito notes that the company wants to become “the one-stop-shop that everyone in the commercial real estate industry uses to manage their portfolios, track their transaction flow, and communicate with their customers. peers and partners ”. Basically, the company wants to do for commercial real estate what Bloomberg has done for financial services.
Commercial real estate – just like its residential counterpart – has long resisted the adaptation of new technology, but that seems to be changing now, as tools like VTS give owners and brokers a head start in a business that relies on more and more about the ability to manage and analyze large amounts of data.
“The commercial real estate industry is huge; all countries in the world use very outdated manual processes to manage their transaction portfolios (rental, tenant management, future exposure, etc.), ”Romito told me. “We see our opportunity as capturing more market share among global real estate investors, owners and brokers, so that we can become the single platform on which the entire industry is managed. A side effect of this is that we generate a ton of data that our customers can mine and use to improve performance. The opportunity is to marry the best software in the industry with very powerful data.
Looking ahead, Romito says the challenge for the company now is to keep up with its growth as it evolves internationally. “Funding can help us be in the right place at the right time, achieving our goal of becoming the industry standard,” he said.
