A friend of mine flipped me this New York Times article today talking about the rapidly growing interest in proptech and about Opendoor – a topic and a company that I have written about many times before on the blog.

Here’s a snippet about proptech:

The hauls are part of a race by investors to pour money into technology for real estate, or what Silicon Valley now calls proptech. Having watched tech start-ups upend old-line industries like taxis and hotels, venture capitalists are casting about for the next area to be infused with software and data. Many have homed in on real estate as a big opportunity because parts of the industry — like pricing, mortgages and building management — have been slow to adopt software that could make business more efficient.

On the Opendoor front, which is the largest/most valuable company in the proptech category, they have now raised over $1 billion. By the end of this year they plan to be in 22 cities across the United States.

Interestingly enough, they have started experimenting with other business models, beyond just buying and flipping homes. They now circumvent agents and sell some homes directly to customers.

But Eric Wu, the CEO of Opendoor, believes that you can’t automate proper advice and so that will remain. The role of agents is simply about to shift from “administration” to that of “advisory”.

I have been arguing for years that the home buying and selling process is ripe for change. And what we are seeing today is really the start of that.

According to the NY Times, real estate tech startups raised $3.4 billion in funding last year. Some firms, such as Fifth Wall Ventures, are entirely dedicated to the space.

This is money betting on change.

Photo by Grant Lemons on Unsplash

I’ve been hearing a lot about Bird recently. Perhaps it has something to do with the $15 million Series A round they raised last month (February 2018) and the $100 million Series B round they announced earlier today.

A “Bird” is small electric scooters that look like this and can be rented from your phone for short haul trips. They are currently available in Santa Monica, Venice, UCLA, Westwood, and San Diego, and they are intended to be ridden in existing bike lanes.

What may be particularly interesting to this blog audience is the fact that Bird is calling itself a “last-mile electric vehicle sharing company.” The pitch: 40% of car trips (in the US?) are less than 2 miles long. Let’s replace those using electric scooters.

One of the first things that came to my mind is that this feels more accessible than cycling. Cycling to work can be a commitment. You have to think about your attire and the sweat factor, among other things.

Would you agree?

Yesterday it was announced (here, here, and here) that Toronto-based Top Hat has raised $22.5 million (USD) in Series-C funding. The round was led by New York-based Union Square Ventures.

I am always excited to see Toronto-based startups doing well and I am particularly excited by this remark in USV’s blog announcement:

“Also worth noting is that Toronto continues to impress us with its quality and diversity of companies. We now have five investments there, placing Toronto third as a location in the USV portfolio after New York and San Francisco.”

Here is another quote from Fred Wilson’s blog:

“Toronto is a great place for startups. In addition to five investments of ours that are HQ’d there, I know of at least one other USV portfolio company that has much of their engineering team in Toronto. The talent, mindset, and quality of the people in the Toronto/Waterloo tech/startup community is really top notch and we love investing there.”

Go Toronto. 

(Of course, Toronto really means Toronto-Waterloo. That’s the geography of the ecosystem.)