CrowdStreet snags $43M from investors to boost online real estate investing platform

This post was written by Malia Spencer and published on 10/10/2022 on BizJournals.com

Real estate investment startup CrowdStreet Inc. raised $43 million from investors in a round led by the venture arm of financial services firm TIAA.

The round was debt and equity and included new backers Cypress Equity Investments, The Dinerstein Cos. and Foulger-Pratt. Existing backers Grotech Ventures, Rally Ventures, Seven Peaks Ventures, and Green Visor Capital also participated.

CrowdStreet was founded in Portland in 2013 but moved its headquarters to Austin, Texas, in 2021. Portland remains the company’s largest employee base. The move to Austin was based on tax and regulation purposes as well as the growth in the company’s customer base in Texas.

The company has 230 employees of whom 60 are in Portland, comprising the largest concentration of workers. The team is mostly remote with a “work from where you work best” model. For those in the Portland metro who want an office, the company has space downtown in the Industrious coworking space.

CrowdStreet built an online marketplace that allows accredited investors to find and back commercial real estate projects nationwide. The software can also be used by developers and project sponsors to manage their own projects and investors.

This funding will be used to improve the underlying technology as well as beef up the investment management tools that investors use every day.

“We are pleased to count so many of these leaders from across the industry as customers, partners, and now, with their participation in this fundraising round, strategic investors,” said CEO Tore Steen in a written statement. “They know us better than anyone and share our vision for the future of commercial real estate investing.”

Since starting CrowdStreet, Steen has been working toward opening up real estate deals, which previously had often been through private networks, to more investors regardless of their location.

The company is also expanding into the world of wealth management with tools for financial advisers to help clients add real estate investing to their portfolio, according to a news release. The company already had CrowdStreet Advisors, which manages $400 million in client assets across private real estate funds and managed accounts.

To date, CrowdStreet has raised more than $3.6 billion for 670 commercial real estate projects across the country. As of August 2022, 138 investments on the platform have been fully realized.

“We’ve watched for several years as CrowdStreet has evolved its fintech platform to better serve real estate project sponsors and its community of investors,” said Shawn Lese, chief investment officer and head of real estate funds management for the Americas, at Nuveen, an investment affiliate of TIAA.

TIAA’s new venture arm TIAA Ventures was used by the PE firm to make this investment.