Northspyre, a project management platform for building owners and developers, raised $25 million in Series B funding.
Real estate owners manage hundreds of relationships with vendors, investors and others through the pre-construction and construction phases of projects, and typically have relied on spreadsheets to budget and deliver on schedule.
Brooklyn-based Northspyre, a self-described “cloud-based intelligence platform,” uses automation, data analytics and artificial intelligence to automate the traditionally labor intensive, manual processes.
Founded and launched in 2017, Northspyre was borne out of co-founder and CEO William Sankey’s own experience running complex developments for the likes of Harry Macklowe’s Macklowe Properties and Madison Realty Capital.
“Real estate teams still use convoluted spreadsheets, and they often rely on just gut instinct to make decisions,” said Sankey, who noted that most real estate projects fail to hit financial targets.
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There are a handful of established construction project management platforms, but no comprehensive project management platform for owners, who are focused primarily on financials — only “bolt on” tools for legacy accounting systems, Sankey said. Excel is still Northspyre’s main competition.
Sankey described Northspyre as part of the “Cloud 2.0” ecosystem.
“A lot of legacy applications were Cloud 1.0,” he said. “They took the work you were doing in a spreadsheet and moved it into the cloud, but you still had to do all of the work and analysis.”
Northspyre’s technology combs a project’s data to “identify challenges and opportunities, and proactively alert you to them,” he said.
Early-stage venture capital firm CRV led Northsypre’s Series B. Other investors include Tamarisc Ventures, Intercom co-founder Des Traynor and Craft Ventures, which led the company’s $7.5 million Series A round in the spring of 2020.
The company focused initially on the New York and Boston markets, and its first customer was the Museum of Modern Art, which undertook a major renovation and expansion in 2019. In 2021, Northspyre expanded to more than 30 cities, including Charlotte, San Diego and Phoenix.
Northspyre offers single-project as well portfolio licenses and says it is “scale- and project-agnostic,” functional for developments ranging from a $4 million custom house to a billion-dollar sports arena.
Headquartered at Normandy Real Estate Partners’ 175 Pearl Street in downtown Brooklyn, it has about 130 customers across the U.S. and has grown revenue sixfold since its Series A round, Sankey said.