In 2022, mortgage rates rose sharply, which had a negative impact on the real estate industry and numerous real estate-related businesses. This didn’t stop industry veteran Clelia Warburg Peters from leaving her role as a venture partner at Bain Capital Ventures to launch her own proptech venture firm.
Unlike many specialized proptech funds, Peters invests in disruptive technology, meaning that it doesn’t just support established businesses; instead, it looks to disrupt the industry.
According to Peters, “it’s really hard to sell things that are just incremental improvements for the real estate industry,” during an interview. “The real estate industry makes terrible use of technology. As of right now, I think we’ve seen it quite clearly.
That message was well received by investors, who contributed $88 million to Peters’s inaugural fund, Era Ventures. But her history was just as significant.
Peters began her real estate career more than ten years ago when her father asked her to help manage Warburg Realty, one of the largest independent real estate brokerages in the New York City area.
She had only intended to assist the real estate company for six months before going back to her primary area of interest, the technology industry.
This insight inspired her to co-found MetaProp in 2014, one of the first real estate-focused specialty firms. Peters claimed to have even contributed to the name “proptech” being established for this new tech sector.
According to Peters, “we had exclusively strategic LPs at MetaProp, who were looking for financial returns from their investment as much as they were for strategic insight.”
Peters stated that strategic investors support the majority of other proptech funds. With Era, whose limited partners include Fenwick & West, New York Presbyterian Hospital, Continental General Insurance Company, and her previous company, Bain Capital Ventures, she was hoping to do something fresh.
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