Occupier, a lease management software solution for commercial real estate tenants and brokers, has raised a $10.5 million Series A funding round co-led by OMERS Ventures and Stage 2 Capital.
Seed stage investors Alate Partners and Metaprop were also participants in the Wednesday round, bringing Occupier’s total funding to date to $15.5 million.
With real estate as the second largest expense for many organizations after payroll, and new lease accounting guidelines requiring greater transparency into organizations’ lease obligations, Occupier is looking to fill the gaps in commercial lease management.
Founded in 2018 by commercial real estate veterans Matt Giffune, Andrew Flint and Erik Pearson, Occupier’s tech stack allows businesses to undertake data-driven analysis to inform decisions like moving office headquarters, opening satellite workspaces and even adopting ghost kitchens.
While many commercial real estate software products are aimed solely at real estate owners, Occupier leans on its more tenant-centered brand – automating complicated processes like lease administration, lease accounting and transaction management.
“Occupier allows brokers and heads of real estate to sign a lease agreement, then automate the management of critical dates and clauses, while the accounting team compliantly recognizes that lease then closes the books, all on one platform,” said Giffune.
Prior to Occupier, Giffune worked with co-founders Flint and Pearson at VTS, a commercial real estate leasing and asset management platform. The trio built out Occupier with the intent to focus on offices as an asset class but quickly expanded its model to any business with a real estate strategy.
The company noted the pandemic forced many corporate tenants to re-evaluate that strategy alongside operations across numerous verticals including, office, retail, healthcare, and restaurants to name a few.
So far, the company has strong backers for potential success. OMERS has funded the likes of tech startups DuckDuckGo, Hopper, Wefox, Shopify and Hootsuite. As for Stage2 Capital, the venture capital firm launched its second fund in late 2021 with plans to invest $80 million into B2B software companies.
In 2020, Occupier launched its Occupier Lease Accounting product to help finance teams comply with the new lease accounting standards FASB ASC 842 and IASB IFRS 16 – these standards alone will bring an estimated $3 trillion in lease liabilities onto the balance sheet in the US, Occupier noted.
With fresh funding, the software developer plans to double its team, hiring engineering, product, sales, customer success and marketing professionals. Funds will also be used to add new features like payment processing, third-party integrations and data customization.
“Sales teams have Salesforce, finance teams have NetSuite, design teams have Figma, HR teams have Workday and now real estate teams have Occupier,” said Liz Christo, Partner at Stage 2 Capital added.