With tenants returning to offices and other commercial buildings, it’s important for real estate companies to make sure they give them the best experience possible.
On Wednesday, Chicago property tech company Cohesion announced the closing of its $15 million Series A. The Morgan Stanley Next Level Fund and Hyde Park Angels led the funding round. Other notable investors include Three Bridges Private Capital, Wintrust Ventures, Frasers Property Group, Michael Sacks, Raj Gupta and billionaire Ken Griffin.
Cohesion originally spun out of engineering and design company Environmental Systems Design (ESD) in 2018. Cohesion’s main product is its smart building SaaS platform, which helps real estate companies manage all the data they have for their buildings, in order to help them make changes or integrate new technology. This data management also allows real estate companies automate certain building functions. Cohesion also recently released new digital twin features to its platform, which helps real estate managers create digital copies of their buildings, in order to test how changes would affect them before investing time and effort into making those changes.
The sheer size and scope of some of these commercial buildings makes managing them a feat for real estate companies. So any tool to help them execute this or save time and money is especially useful. On top of that, the challenges that the commercial real estate industry saw during the pandemic led to a large adoption of tech solutions.
This has benefited Cohesion. Built In last spoke to Cohesion in 2020 after the company raised $6.5 million in seed funding. At the time, Cohesion CEO and co-founder Thru Shivakumar told Built In that buildings often struggle adapting to new technologies.
“Even though buildings are built to be these gorgeous, beautiful structures that are very forward-thinking from a design perspective, the technology behind them is pretty archaic,” she said.
Cohesion helps real estate companies manage tens of millions of square feet of commercial office space. And the size of the company is growing too. In July of 2020, Cohesion had just 11 employees. Now the company sits at around 100 employees.
The new funding will help Cohesion invest in product and market expansion. It also plans to use the new capital to form new strategic partnerships, like the partnerships it has with Morgan Stanley, Transwestern and others.
“Bringing the power and promise of autonomous technology to commercial real estate is more critical today than ever before,” Shivakumar said in a statement. “As a leader in this emerging space, we have the technological capability to connect disparate systems and use big data to make buildings more transparent, healthier, engaging and sustainable. Investing in technology that ensures commercial real estate is a positive contributor to our world is central to our company ethos.”
