After $370M funding round, Compass back under IPO spotlight

After raising another $370 million, the only thing standing between Compass and an IPO is time. The New York-based brokerage — now valued at $6.4 billion — announced its latest round Tuesday, eliciting a new round of speculation as to when it may go public. Robert Reffkin, CEO and co-founder of the firm, acknowledged Tuesday that going public was in the cards.

Real Estate Startup VTS Names M&A-Savvy CFO After Reaching Unicorn Status

VTS Inc. hired a mergers-and-acquisitions veteran as its next finance chief, a move that comes on the heels of a funding round that propelled the real-estate technology company to a $1 billion valuation.

Real estate platform Compass raises another $370M on a $6.4B valuation en route to an IPO

The real estate market regularly goes through ups and downs, but today comes big news for a startup in the space that has built a platform that it believes can help all players in it — buyers, sellers and those who help with the buying and selling — no matter what stage of the cycle we happen to be in. Compass — a company that has built a three-sided marketplace for the industry, along with a wide set of algorithms to help make it work — has raised a $370 million round of funding, money that it…

Techstars nabs $42M to expand its global presence

Techstars, a startup accelerator founded in 2006, has plans to double down on international growth with a new investment. SVB Financial Group, the holding company of Silicon Valley Bank, led the $42 million round in Techstars, with participation from Foundry Group. With $500 million AUM, Techstars is both a fund deploying capital to early-stage upstarts and an operating business nearing $100 million in annual revenue. Its latest equity investment, announced this morning, will fuel the latt…

Hyperion Launches Titan Map Store, A Decentralized Map Data Layer Service

SINGAPORE, July 29, 2019 /PRNewswire/ — In mid of July, Hyperion, as the largest map blockchain, officially announced to launch Titan Map Store — a decentralized map data layer service. Via the map store, users can access various open-source map layers for a more convenient and personalized routine planning. For example, when someone needs to check nearby U.S. Embassy or Consulate location, they can view the location details through the Embassy and Consulate map layer. In the meantime, map sto…

Meet Brendan Wallace, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Fifth Wall Ventures

Fifth Wall’s LPs include 50 of the largest owners and operators in the real estate space

Venture capital used to be a cottage industry, with very few investing in tomorrow’s products and services. Oh, how times have changed! While there are more startups than ever, there’s also more money chasing them. In this series, we look at the new (or relatively new) VCs in the early stages: seed and Series A.

Amazon Is A $12B Machine Creating Product For The Real Estate Investment Market

As a shopper, it can be hard to remember what the world was like before Amazon came along. The same is pretty much true if you are a real estate investor. Korean investors IGIS and Korean Investment & Securities completed an equity raising earlier this month to buy three warehouses leased to Amazon for around £400M, according to React News. When this deal completes later this year, around $12B of assets where Amazon is the occupier will have been traded globally in the last decade, acc…

Search Verified and Accurate Up-to-Date Listings

Digital listings are an essential real estate tool, and there’s more than one free-to-search commercial real estate marketplace available. So how do you decide which one to trust? With so many free-to-list sites and readily accessible APIs, accurate information on listing sites is harder to come by than ever. While most real estate marketplaces aggregate listings from numerous sources without double checking information listed, the newest CRE marketplace has implemented an important character…

Startups, Especially Software Startups, Are Raising Up Rounds At Near Record Pace

A few weeks back the Crunchbase News team published a raft of information regarding the global and U.S. venture capital markets, along with dives into popular markets like Texas domestically, China globally, and more. One data point that we don’t track, however, is the percentage of ‘up rounds’ versus ‘down rounds’ in the period. In English, that means we don’t keep tabs on how many startups out of 100 who raise more capital do so at a higher valuation (price increase) or lower valuation (pri…

A Growing Share Of Global VC Funding Is Going To North America

In recent years, the prevailing trend in global venture funding has been the movement of more capital to tech hubs outside the United States, to China in particular. However, data for the past two quarters indicates that the trend is reversing course. For the first two quarters of 2019, North American startups* pulled in 49 percent of total global venture investment, per Crunchbase projections, far above 2018 totals.