Author: JLL Spark

After venture capital funding reached record levels in the first six months of the year, can the sector maintain its momentum despite “some choppiness”?

JLL has inked a new partnership with a proptech firm as part of its effort to build an ecosystem of tech solutions for office landlords and tenants. 

The global commercial real estate firm reached a deal to sell one of its own workplace tech applications to HqO, a startup it invested in last year, as a way to combine two types of office tech offerings into one platform, JLL Technologies President Sharad Rastogi told Bisnow. 

In 2017, JLL started JLL Spark Global Venture Fund, a venture capital arm. A year later it announced that it planned to invest upwards of $100 million into real estate technology startups. Recently, the company said that it had made more than $340 million in investments since June 2018.

HomeLight, a San Francisco-based proptech firm that facilitates contingency-free, cash transactions, bought the Denver-headquartered fintech Accept.inc — its third acquisition in as many years — making it the largest “agent-focused cash offer program” in the U.S.

After years of exuberant dealmaking, the proptech industry is facing a reckoning. 

Proptech unicorns that raised boatloads of cash and went public with promises to disrupt the multitrillion-dollar commercial real estate industry have seen their valuations plummet in recent months. The sector’s losses have outpaced the overall market drop this year as the Federal Reserve has taken aggressive measures to curb inflation.

AI-based scheduling and project management tech firm ALICE Technologies announced June 13 that is has raised $30 million in a Series B funding round.

ALICE specializes in an AI-driven analysis of preconstruction data to generate a full construction sequencing plan. Everything from erection of the structure to the management of labor and materials is handled by the AI, which can adjust parameters to find more optimal scheduling paths.

On this episode of the LA Venture podcast, JLL Spark’s Laurent Grill talks about the world of proptech, COVID’s impact on the office and lowering buildings’ emissions.

This series gets into the heads of the decision-makers of CRE, the people shaping the industry by setting investment strategy, workplace design, diversity initiatives and more.

He isn’t a train driver like he wanted to be, but Raj Singh is responsible instead for driving the proptech industry forward.  

The Berlin-based modular carbon-neutral housing retrofit startup designs façade and roof elements that can be built around existing buildings as a second skin

How do you start figuring out what tech your offices, shops or warehouses need when there are thousands of startups in the industry? PlaceTech speaks to JLL Spark’s Raj Singh for his advice on getting it right.