PropTech Firm Lane Gears Up for New Fundraise, Eyes New Markets
Lane Co-founder Kofi Gyekye said, “It’s very important to build a central platform," to foster community because the market now demands it.
NEW YORK CITY–Lane, a commercial real estate prop-tech firm, is gearing up to launch a fundraiser to scale its global market share and up its 119 million square feet in the market. It expects to add 80 million square feet by year-end.
The Toronto-based company deploys its technology out on a modular platform, where property management, tenants, including amenity providers can engage in a centralized platform. “It’s very important to build a central platform instead of a singular mobile app,” Kofi Gyekye, co-founder and chief product officer at Lane, tells GlobeSt.com. “We’re giving them the technology to interface with other providers and connect with other providers in a community.”
Lane has grown its footprint by more than 50 percent over the last quarter, counting Brookfield Properties, Colliers and Dream as clients, and on-boarded Class A real estate assets that include the Wells Fargo Center and Bank of America Plaza in Downtown Los Angeles, totaling 20 million square feet in transactions that took two weeks to complete.
Only in operating in the US for the first time this year, Lane is onboarding 1,000 new users to its platform every week. An estimated 10 million actions are performed on the platform weekly, with added integrations daily to allow flexibility to tenants and their access to preferred amenities in the workplace.
The company launched with $2.5 million in funding back in 2015. Gen-X and Millennials end-users wanted the option for landlord-tenant interaction, according to Gyekye.
“When we got started, we wanted to prove to the market that there was actually a ‘market,’ and run an actual business with paying clients,” Gyekye said. “We wanted to make sure we were providing what was necessary to the market, and that we mitigated risk with our partners and investors.”
As part of its expansion, the company is carving out market share in Boston, Richmond, VA., Baltimore, Philadelphia, Washington and internationally to Australia, Dubai and London.
“We recognized that to solve workplace issues you had to address that people are in a built environment, and nothing connected them to the environment around them, we plan to continue in that endeavor,” Gyekye said.