Northspyre: Bringing the Real Estate Industry Into the 21st Century
By Anna Khan, General Partner
Having built a career in VC around industries that have traditionally been left behind when it comes to technology, I was immediately drawn to Northspyre co-founder William Sankey. William had discovered firsthand that one of the largest economic sectors was woefully antiquated when it came to the use of technology.
William initially created the first iteration of Northspyre software while working in commercial real estate for some of the most prestigious companies in the industry including Jones Lang LaSalle — where he helped manage the Madison Square Garden Transformation — Macklowe Properties and Madison Realty Trust. Graduating from Yale with a B.A. in Architecture and then receiving a Masters in Urban Planning & Real Estate Development from Harvard, William is a real estate aficionado, and obsessed with bettering the day to day work of his fellow developers through better technology. He’s also brought together an incredible team of technical leaders with Andrew Tam as Chief Technology Officer, who spent four years as an engineering leader at Sailthru, and Matthew Phinney, Chief Architect, who spent 5.5 years as a senior engineer at Ripple.
An industry valued at more than $15 trillion dollars and responsible for billions of dollars in transactions, real estate had been until now still reliant on Excel spreadsheets. It’s no surprise that three-fourths of real estate projects finish over-budget and fail to hit financial targets due to these inefficient management methods.
Northspyre aspires to become the system of record and operating system for the top of the real estate food pyramid. Akin to what Procore does for the construction market, and Yardi does for lease management, Northspyre is seeking to do for developers to track their cost to budget performance across their portfolio and manage invoices/vendor relationships. Once developers saw the efficiencies of those other platforms, they couldn’t help but wonder, where’s our system?
Whether it’s a real estate owner (or their representative) who is constructing or renovating a building; fitting out a space within a building, or completing any type of capital expenditure related to real estate creation, they are a target for Northspyre.
The results speak for themselves: Northspyre has helped facilitate more than $30 billion in capital commercial real estate projects and is being used by more than 130 customers in nearly every major U.S. city. More importantly, customers love the product. I have pages and pages of notes of developers raving about the product like the following: “I have several Northspyre tabs open every single day and spend hours in the product. In fact, I have started marketing Northspyre in my own book building and have won customers because I use it.”
I’m thrilled to lead Northspyre’s $25 million Series B funding round, and excited to see the company continue to expand its solution to improve the development process within the multi-trillion dollar commercial real estate industry.
If you are a founder of a SaaS company — vertical or horizontal — we would love to connect with you. CRV is an early-stage venture capital firm that has backed over 400 startups in its 51-year history, including Airtable, DoorDash, Postman, Twitter and Zendesk.
