Investor and developer Jeff Vinik announced a $12 million investment in Dreamit and will be joining the firm as a Partner and member of Dreamit’s Board of Directors. Dreamit works with top global health and urban technology startups (real estate tech, construction tech, smart buildings / smart city tech), providing access to extensive customer, industry, and investor networks during 14-week acceleration programs. Startups pitch, pilot, and partner with some of the largest organizations in real estate, construction, and healthcare.

Somatix employs real-time analysis of the three-dimensional vectors that represent hand motion, allowing it to identify and distinguish between our daily gestures, such as eating, drinking, smoking, taking medication or even shaving.

Dreamit Managing Director Andrew Ackerman discusses challenges with emerging market investing, what smart investors understand about timing, how accelerators compete, differentiate and win, and how angels and VCs need to think differently to drive returns. 

Over $5 billion was invested in real estate technology in 2017. The sector has strong momentum, and according to Matt Harris from Bain Capital Ventures, we are entering the third wave of real estate technology. 

Homesnap is a productivity and marketing app for real estate agents. The startup just announced a $14M Series B led by Updata Partners. The startup claims that around 75% of the real estate agents in the United States are using the Homesnap product. 

Our friends at 43North are looking for awesome startups that are willing to relocate to Buffalo, NY and receive a $500k or $1M investment. 43North has crowned 37 winners since coming on the scene as part of Governor Andrew Cuomo’s Buffalo Billion initiative in 2014.  Alumni of the program have gone on to raise more than $70 million. See their portfolio here. 

Startups have a limited budget for marketing, so it's critical that they prioritize how those dollars are spent. Market segmentation can help startups prioritize their resources to achieve the largest impact with the leanest budget. It's a data-driven exercise and a key component of any marketing plan. In this webinar, Stephen Bouikidis and Mary Jordan of Magma Digital will present tools and tactics that enable founders to evaluate opportunities and reach new audiences. 

Dreamit HealthTech alum Somatix beat out over 40 other startups to win the first-ever "Market Disrupt" pitch competition at the "Employer Healthcare & Benefits Congress and World Medical Tourism & Global Healthcare Congress." 

Commercial real estate just got a little more efficient. CRE data startup Reonomy announced a new $16M funding round led by Bain Capital Ventures.  The startup is also entering a partnership with Newmark Knight Frank, allowing the brokerage to layer Reonomy data atop its own data. We dive into the big problem Reonomy is solving. 

Market segmentation is a data-driven exercise that founders should engage in at various points after they begin selling to customers. To figure out your market segments, your team should be looking at factors such as market size, growth rate, CAC, win rate for gaining customers, and average LTV. Based on these numbers, you can then determine your sales activities, marketing initiatives and even your product roadmap. In this series, we'll discuss key topics around market segmentation and give you a framework for doing it effectively for your startup. 

It's critical to constantly get feedback from customers when building a startup. Maybe you are launching a new product or rolling out a new feature. Maybe you are just launching your company and you want to get feedback on your minimum viable product. Maybe your feature set has become unwieldy and you are trying to figure out which parts of the product people value the most. Here's a way to conduct customer interviews in a scalable way. 

Sidewalk Labs announced the launch of a new spinoff company, Coord, that will be a connective tissue for street-related data, government, private companies, emerging mobility services, and the people who live in cities. Coord is an API layer for transportation and a coordination platform for mobility services, navigation tools, and urban infrastructure. The company can help a ride-hail service make safer curbside drop-offs, help a navigation app show bike-share options, or help a car-share service give members a better sense of the true cost of their trip.

According to the WSJ, Developers are starting to future-proof parking garages that may be obsolete in the coming years. With autonomous vehicles becoming an inevitability, garages must be designed to be used for cars now and repurposed for other things later. Master-planned projects in cities like Toronto, Los Angeles, Oslo, San Francisco and Boston are being built with features like curbside drop-off areas for passengers and e-commerce deliveries, which will replace traditional parking lanes. Developers in high-density areas are looking to existing parking infrastructure for conversion projects, with an added benefit of being able to label these "sustainable" projects because they conserve materials. 

Every day at Dreamit UrbanTech, we interact with new startups transforming this supply chain, and as part of our 14-week growth-focused program, we bring select startups on a 2-week "Investor Roadshow" where they meet with dozens of investors from both generalist firms and from firms focused on real estate, construction, and products for smarter cities. We wanted to share some of our favorite firms focused on the built environment so you can use it as a resource for fundraising. We will continue to maintain this spreadsheet and will be updating it regularly with new venture investors who we meet who are committed to transforming real estate, construction, and the built environment.

According to Healthcare IT News, Mount Sinai Health System is trying a new way to get high-risk patients to take their medications: financial incentives. The founders of Wellth met executives from Mount Sinai as part of Dreamit Health's customer immersion program when they took part in Dreamit Health Fall 2016 cohort. Now, the startup has enrolled 12 patients in a pilot with the New York health system (supported by a grant from Health 2.0 and the New York City Economic Development Corporation). 

Katerra is attempting to disrupt the construction industry "design-bid-build process" by creating a full-stack solution for the building process. The startup works with real estate developers to replace any or all of the disparate parts of the building supply chain, including architecture firms, contractors, subcontractors, engineers, and materials producers. 

Health IT startup Protenus (Dreamit Health 2014) has raised $11 million in a Series B round led by Kaiser Permanente Ventures and F-Prime Capital Partners, according to a company release. Arthur Ventures, LionBird Venture Capital, and Cognosante Ventures also participated. 

Tissue Analytics raised a $5 million Series A round of financing, led by digital health-focused private equity firm DigiTx Partners. The startup graduated from the Dreamit Health program in 2015 and has established partnerships with major healthcare software and electronic medical records providers like Athenahealth Inc., AllscriptsHealthcare Solutions Inc. and Epic. 

What we're reading in digital health news this week.