Urbantech BLOG
Early-stage investors will probably ask you about your exit strategy. Don’t fall into the traps of thinking small or leaving the party too early. You’re building the right venture for the right reasons so use exit as an opportunity to let that shine.
What can founders can do to successfully raise venture capital from real estate tech investors? These tips and strategies can help startups successfully pitch their product to real estate-focused venture funds.
Getting investors excited about your product is a critical part of raising capital. But founders are often so consumed with talking metrics, milestones achieved, or the capital they need that they sometimes forget to talk about their overarching vision for their startups. In this article, we provide some strategies for selling investors on your vision for your startup.
TechCrunch asked 16 leading people who actively invest in construction robotics and work at firms spanning early to growth-stage to share what’s exciting them most and where they see opportunity in the sector.
Read the latest Urbantech news, learn about upcoming events, find out what’s going on in the world of real estate tech and construction tech, watch our latest #DreamitLive, and more.
In this #DreamitLive, Urbantech Managing Director Andrew Ackerman speaks with CREtech CEO Michael Beckerman about the latest trends in innovation in the commercial real estate industry. Michael Beckerman runs CREtech, the largest event, data and content platform in the commercial real estate tech sector.
Real estate data is notoriously fragmented, but a new crop of startups, including Cherre, are helping businesses harness disparate data sources and gain a competitive edge. In this episode, Urbantech Managing Director Andrew Ackerman sits with L.D. Salmanson, founder of Cherre, to discuss his startup’s path to becoming a leader in real estate data.
Fundraising is hard, and it’s critical to have a game-plan and process for raising capital. In this episode, Steve Barsh discusses some strategies that founders can use to close a new round of funding. He talks about how to create momentum, revenue metrics you’ll need to show for seed and Series A funding, what a typical timeline looks like, how to determine the amount of capital you need to raise, and more.
In this DreamitLive, Urbantech Managing Director Andrew Ackerman speaks with StringBean founder and CEO Reuben Levine about the do’s and don’ts of selling into real estate, including how to get into the mind of the buyer, how to de-risk your product to increase the likelihood of making a sale, and how to pursue product-led growth.
This is part two of a multipart series on corporate innovation from Dreamit Ventures, focusing on why corporate venture capital initiatives fail.
Dreamit alum Jose ‘Caya’ Cayasso from Slidebean discusses 5 big lessons he learned about raising capital and startup funding.
When pitching to VCs, one of the most frequent errors founders make is incorrectly presenting their total addressable market, or TAM for short. Perhaps because this number is hypothetical and dependent on so many different factors, some founders do not give it the time it deserves. In this post, we offer some tips on how to impress investors when presenting your TAM.
Under lean startup methodology, founders attempt to eliminate as much uncertainty as possible to create some order out of the chaos involved in starting a company. Failures are inevitable; but, great founders know how to fail quickly and cheaply, rather than trying to take on boatloads of venture capital funding to solve a problem with an approach that doesn’t scale or, even worse, to solve a problem that does not exist or is not that painful. Read more about strategies you can use to identify and de-risk key assumptions.
Read our latest news round up on tech trends in cities, real estate technology, construction technology, built world fundraising news, and more.
According to Goldman Sachs, virtual and augmented reality (AR) will become an $80 billion market by 2025, and $2.6 billion will be specifically for real estate. The medium is extremely powerful. About 30% of the neurons in the brain are dedicated to vision, compared to only 8% for touch and 2% for hearing. Over the past week, Zillow announced the rollout of their 3D Home tool, which lets real estate agents show immersive VC views of homes for sale. Read about the startups innovating in this space.
We are thrilled to announce the newest Dreamit cohort, selected from a field of nearly 2,000 pre-Series A startups.
Dreamit UrbanTech Managing Director Andrew Ackerman joined Charlie Stephens (@charlieNYC), a real estate advisor at Cushman & Wakefield, for his “Leaders Live” series of interviews. Stephens has been involved in advising over a million square feet of tenant and landlord representation transactions within Manhattan and across the country since 2009. He has worked with clients such as Conde Nast, ING, Ernst and Young, and many more.
On May 14, 2019, our friends at Lab Ventures Miami are hosting Future of Real Estate Tech Summit Miami
This event brings together investors, innovative startups and leading corporations in the construction and real estate industry. The audience will be highly curated creating powerful networking opportunities with C-level executives from Developers, Owners, Associations, Construction Companies, Multifamily Offices, Architects, Growth Stage Startups, Strategics, Commercial Developers and more. Startups can apply to pitch at the event.
Remix is currently being used by over 4,000 planners in over 300 cities to enable planners to visualize tradeoffs when making urban planning decisions. The startup is attempting to streamline decision-making for city planners, allowing planners to drag and drop changes like re-route bus routes or additional bike lanes. Planners then see in real time how that change will affect other streets and the flow of transportation as a whole. For cities, better planning results in shorter commute times, safer streets, and lower greenhouse gas emissions.
What we’re reading in urban tech, real estate, and construction tech news this week.
Dreamit is designed to help pre-Series A startups with a market-ready product and traction acquire new enterprise customers and raise their next institutional round of funding. Learn more about the day-to-day structure of the program and how it allows founders to scale their companies in a flexible way.
Read our latest UrbanTech newsletter for industry news, funding announcements, real estate and construction trends, events, and more.
According to RE:tech, venture investors deployed over $3.2 billion into real estate tech startups in November. The majority of this capital went to just three companies. WeWork raised $3 billion, while Nested and PropertyFinder raised just over $120 million each. All other earlier stage real estate tech startups split the remaining $34 million of total funding in November.
Dreamit designed Customer Sprints to help startups overcome challenges and accelerate customer acquisition. Over 50 “startup-ready” corporates that are eager to purchase and pilot early-stage technologies from pre-Series A founders make up Dreamit’s Customer Network.
Cherre, a real estate data platform that completed Dreamit UrbanTech in 2018, announced a $9 million seed funding round led by Navitas Capital. Cherre provides large enterprises, insurance companies, banks and investors with a platform to collect, augment, and resolve property data in real-time from thousands of public, private, and internal sources, allowing them to evaluate investment and underwriting opportunities more accurately and efficiently than ever before.
Andrew Ackerman sits down for a brief interview with Atlanta-based 3Ci CONNECT at Built Tech Week to discuss the Dreamit UrbanTech program.
The Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY) are hosting a PropTech Challenge and giving startups a chance to win $50,000. This new virtual real estate hackathon encourages the development of cutting-edge solutions to solve challenges faced by today’s leading real estate companies and removes the physical limitations of a traditional hackathon, while creating active mentorship for up-and-coming technology innovators.
Meet the four breakthrough companies were accepted into Dreamit’s growth-focused program for real estate tech and construction tech startups.
Dreamit UrbanTech Managing Director Andrew Ackerman gives his advice to founders in Propmodo about how to create a market size slide that will impress potential investors. Too often, founders present a top-down market size estimate that includes irrelevant pieces of the market and does not include any numbers related to product pricing. Investors have such low expectations from this slide that they often gloss over it during meetings and figure out the estimate themselves.
Dreamit UrbanTech Managing Director Andrew Ackerman talks about the qualities he likes to see when investing in companies, Dreamit Ventures customer immersion program, what separates Dreamit from other venture funds, and tips for impressing investors.