🏡 Prospects in Proptech
Founders Factory Startup Bulletin #41
We bring you a round-up of startup and investment stories, key learnings from founders, and insights from the Founders Factory team.
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When French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon declared “Property is theft!”, he clearly hadn’t accounted for future developments and innovations that would transform the property market.
Over the past decades, we’ve seen a particular concentration of interest around addressing challenges that face urban living. Proptech as a category has meant finding new ways to solve challenges across the value chain, from finding a house, buying one, renovating and retrofitting it, and eventually, selling it. That’s not to mention the trillions in value locked up in commercial real estate.
In today’s newsletter, we’re celebrating a number of founders thinking particularly creatively around these problems and building exciting new proptech ventures to solve them.
Also in this month’s Startup Bulletin:
⭐️ What we enjoyed reading this month
⭐️ Highlights from Founders Factory & our global portfolio
⭐️ Opportunities in tech—events, job roles, etc.
📣 Refer a friend, colleague, co-founder…
We’ve launched our new referral scheme on Substack:
⭐️ 5 referrals = Newsletter shoutout
⭐️ 15 referrals = Startup spotlight in our newsletter
⭐️ 30 referrals = 1-2-1 Zoom consultation with a member of our Ops Team
🏡 There's proptech for….
One of the most exciting aspects of proptech as a category is how broad and varied it is. Here are a number of opportunities where we’ve seen proptech solutions:
…Building more energy efficient homes
There’s an urgent and growing demand to address household carbon emissions. In the UK, these account for over a quarter of total carbon emissions, a result of leaky, inefficient housing stock; in the EU, this is as high as 36%.
In many countries, it will soon be enshrined in law that housing must meet a minimum standard of efficiency. But how can we ensure homeowners and landlords upgrade properties that that many simply cannot afford to retrofit?
Furbnow is one proptech venture hoping to transform the end-to-end experience of home retrofitting. One platform connects homeowners, contractors, surveyors, and suppliers, streamlining a process that is known for its bottlenecks.
And for those who cannot afford to retrofit themselves? There’s Econest, a ‘sustainability-led property developer’. Their mission is to buy up leaky housing stock, retrofit it (benefitting from scale of operations), to then manage at scale for large investment portfolios.
…Improving real estate decision making
AI unlocks decision making for a number of industries—so why can’t real estate be the same? Real estate investors with large portfolios can easily miss valuable information or key opportunities that could prove instrumental to their investments.
To solve this, Built AI has built a digital twin of the global commercial real estate market, an engine that can power real estate decision making for everyone from investors to brokers to agents.
…For widening access to home ownership
Getting the first foot on the property ladder can be the hardest—and it’s only getting harder. Millennials are less well off than their parents at the same stage in life, at odds with the increasing cost of buying a house. First time homebuyers are more reliant than ever on intergenerational wealth (AKA bank of Mum and Dad) to secure a mortgage and put together a deposit for a new home.
Tembo is using this same logic and expanding it, helping first time homebuyers maximise borrowing and mortgage affordability, all through the power of family—whether that’s using a family member as a guarantor, or capitalising on value from their property, or through shared ownership mortgages.
We’ve just launched a new Proptech Venture Studio, backed by Vonovia, Europe’s largest housing group. We’re already up-and-running with our first two concepts, which you can find out more about below (and how to apply as an EIR):
📚 What we enjoyed reading this month
AI Survey: Four Themes Emerging (Bain & Company)
2024 SaaS Trends – Usage (Productiv)
The state of AI in early 2024: Gen AI adoption spikes and starts to generate value (McKinsey & Company)
The Startup Manifesto (Startup Coalition)
🚀 Highlights from the Founders Factory community
Materials Nexus announced the latest breakthrough from their AI & quantum powered material discovery platform. MagNex is a permanent, rare earth free magnet which took just 3 months to design, synthesise and test
Gridshare reached 100% on their first crowdfunding campaign, offering retail investors the chance to own part of a newly constructed solar farm
Furbnow founder Becky Lane featured in this month’s Business Green, sharing her key insights from building out a home retrofitting platform
Nesta hosted a Pitch Showcase, hosting three Mission Studio businesses—Martee AI, Mealia, and Ogma—to pitch to a room of mission-led investors
We announced our first two MB Speedup investments, in partnership with Mediobanca—Dataspark, who are building a GenAI ecosystem for enterprise, and Connexa, a turnkey telematics solution for car insurers
Kaizan has launched out of beta. They’ve built an AI powered client service, using natural language processing to measure client sentiment
Opportunities
📅 Events
Sifted Startup Life (July 9th, London)—join for a discussion on ‘AI vs employees’, as well as a networking session with the Sifted Editorial team
Jumpstart’s Big Startup 5K (August 6th, Battersea Park)—bringing together 1,000 people from the startup ecosystem to Battersea Park for a 5K fun-run
💼 Job roles
We’ve got a number of open roles across our team and portfolio, which you can check out here. Here are three highlights:
Entrepreneur-in-Residence @ Project Tetto (Milan, Hybrid)—LLM-powered home insurance
Accelerator Program Operations Lead @ Founders Factory (Perth)—supporting day-to-day operations of our new accelerator programs with Rio Tinto and the WA Government
FP&A Lead @ Perlego (London or Remote)—focus on financial operations and strategic decision making at join this fast-growing edtech
See you next month 👋
Interested in reading more of the same insights? Check out the Founders Factory blog, and previous newsletters.