CrowdStreet, an online marketplace for real estate investing, has raised $12m in Series C funding within just one month.
The company leveraged its own platform to facilitate the funding, receiving contributions from its community of individual investors and commercial real estate sponsors.
CrowdStreet’s CEO Tore Steen said the company had wanted to further its goal of democratizing access to commercial real estate investing and so opened itself up and offered individuals an opportunity typically left for venture capitalists.
Investing was made open to a group of individuals and strategic partners of the company. Previous backers of the company, Grotech Ventures, Rally Ventures, Seven Peaks Ventures and Green Visor Capital committed renewed funds to the startup.
Within a week of announcing the funding, CrowdStreet had already raised 75% of the funds.
Individuals can use CrowdStreet to build portfolios comprised of real estate assets, with a variety of opportunities and building types available. CrowdStreet is set to raise more than $500m in real estate investment through its marketplace in 2019, it claims.
The series investment comes after CrowdStreet recently appointed three new executives and set a new quarterly record for capital raised on its marketplace.
CrowdStreet CEO Tore Steen said, “For years we have had investors requesting to invest in CrowdStreet as a company, not just in the deals on our Marketplace. So, for this round, we thought we would do things differently instead of going the traditional institutional route.
“We used our own technology to run this process giving some of the most active members of our community of investors a chance to invest in the company itself. Given how capital-efficient our business is, it wasn’t imperative for us to raise money. However, the rapid acceleration we had in 2019 has presented additional opportunities that we can capitalize on with this new funding.â€
Last year, the real estate marketplace netted an $8m investment to support its next phase of growth. Since the platform was founded in 2013, it has raised $25m in funding.
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