$13 million for Reonomy

This is a week of follow-on fundings in our portfolio. Earlier in the week, I wrote about x.ai and now it’s time to discuss Reonomy. Reonomy was the first company I funded as a professional investor and, as they say, there’s nothing quite like your first. I wrote about our decision to invest back in March of last year and since then, have been in the weeds with Rich, Charlie and Brad at the board level doing our best to help the team navigate the waters of commercial real estate technology. Reonomy offers a subscription-based software product that offers property-specific intelligence, analytics and market data. As CEO, Rich has done a terrific job steering the company from a 5-person team in a ramshackle office with no sunlight to a 14-person team comprised of some of the very best machine learning and data science engineers. I affectionately call Rich "the maestro" because, like a skilled orchestra conductor, he is masterful at getting all the moving pieces of a startup into the right places.

A few months ago, the company moved into a nice office on West 21st Street and hired their first business development professional to begin signing up users. The reception from the market that Reonomy serves - commercial real estate lenders, brokers, investors, advisors - was quite strong and within three months of launching sales, Reonomy counted some of the largest and most established commercial banks, mortgage brokers and property brokerage firms as customers. On the product side, they brought design and usability in-house and have made terrific strides taking the product from an early vision to something that’s commercially viable and intuitively simple to use.

Early last fall, reacting to the quick sales traction and validated market opportunity, Rich opted to test the market with an accelerated growth plan that would have us raise a Series B sooner than originally planned. Rich setup meetings with six funds, but it only took four before he found a partner who quickly grasped the vision and understood the size of the opportunity. Mike and Jordan at Bain Capital Ventures moved swiftly in their analysis and in making a commitment to partnering with Reonomy. As any experienced entrepreneur knows, there are few greater gifts an investor can give a company than speed and efficiency in fundraising. Mike’s expertise in information services makes him an ideal partner for the company and all of us earlier investors are thrilled to have them involved. The opportunity Reonomy is tackling is large. It requires rolling out support for 12+ cities in the US and abroad, serving thousands of constituents in the commercial real estate industry who have demand for the information they provide, and building out a team who can execute and manage that scale of offering. With $13 million in new funding, Reonomy becomes one of the best funded companies in commercial real estate technology, and now has the fuel required to scale the operation and execute on the ambitious plan set by the founders. Their biggest challenge begins now and we're excited to be their partners in it.

The Real Deal had a nice writeup of the Reonomy financing that I link to here.