On Monday, Greensoil PropTech Ventures announced the closing of its second fund, totaling $100 million available for PropTech investments. The Fund's first closing is anchored by the Public Sector Pension Investment Board (PSP Investments), one of Canada's largest pension investment managers, and Starlight Investments, a commercial real estate company with $20 billion of assets under management.
Corona tech goes to the top of the list
The fund is expected to invest in Series A and B startups, and mention that they are looking for Israeli startups which have finished product development and have already onboarded paying customers. Additionally, Greensoil will look to provide follow up investments on their portfolio companies.
In a conversation with Geektime, co-founder and Managing Partners Gideon Soesman talks about the general uncertainty covering the real estate sector - Greensoil’s focus - during the global COVID pandemic. He notes that real estate hasn’t suffered just one critical hit, but the hurt has come in sections: “For example, residential real estate didn’t really get hit, while commerce real estate took a major blow. But these trends started even before COVID, which only accelerated what was already happening. Commercial and business real estate are still up in the air, waiting to see how the world emerges from COVID. If people continue the work-from-home lifestyle, then residential houses will need more business space.”
Soesman also says that the global pandemic has created opportunity for Israeli startups to lead industries that experienced acceleration over the past year, such as with air quality; building capacity management - for office and commercial buildings; social distancing systems designed for construction and sensor based remote management abilities to monitor and manage active work sites. Soesman adds that Greensoil “see many opportunities, just like the financial sector after the 2008 economic crash. We’ve defined technologies helping combat the impact of COVID as a key focus for us.”
Greensoil PropTech Ventures was founded in Israel back in 2011 by Chairman Alan Greenberg and Gideon Soasman, an Israeli entrepreneur and investor. The VC firm has previously closed two funds targeting the Agro-foodtech sectors, and in 2015 closed their first PropTech fund - which invested $60 million in 11 companies from North America.
"From its origins of largely hardware-focused technologies to reduce facility operating costs, PropTech is exploding into a myriad of technologies, leveraging the cloud, machine learning and SaaS business models to provide real estate-specific use cases," said David Harris Kolada, Managing Partner of Greensoil PropTech Ventures and fund manager of GSPV II. "With our new fund, we will be financing opportunities resulting from the digital disruption of the entire real estate value chain."
