The real estate market and many real estate-focused startups were hit hard when mortgage rates skyrocketed in 2022, but that 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.
Peters, unlike many other specialist proptech funds, invests in technologies that aim to transform the industry rather than simply serve existing players.
“Things that are purely incremental improvements for the real estate industry are really tough to sell,” Peters told TechCrunch. “The real estate industry is a bad customer of technology. I think we’ve seen that pretty definitively at this point.”
That message resonated with investors, who committed $88 million to the first fund of Peters’ firm, Era Ventures. But her experience was also critical.
Peters’ career in real estate began over 10 years ago when she was asked to manage a family business, one of the largest independent real estate brokerages in the New York City area.
She thought she would spend only six months helping the realty company before returning to her main passion, the tech sector. “I got really sucked into working in real estate, but I was also stunned by the lack of innovation in the space,” Peters said.
In 2014, that realization led her to co-found MetaProp, one of the first specialist firms focused on the real estate. In fact, Peters said she coined the term ‘proptech’ for the emerging tech area.
“At MetaProp, we had exclusively strategic LPs, who were looking as much for strategic insight as they were for financial returns from their investment,” Peters said.
Peters said that most other proptech funds are backed by strategic investors. But she was looking to do something different with Era, whose limited partners include New York Presbyterian Hospital, Continental General Insurance Company, Fenwick & West and her former employer, Bain Capital Ventures.
“I wanted the freedom to invest in [companies] that could be competitors to investors who are strategic LPs for a lot of my peer funds. I also wanted to be very clear that we are investing for what I hope will be top quartile or top decile financial returns,” Peters said. “I think [other] funds in this sector don’t necessarily have this as their North Star.”
Peters credits her experience in Bain and the mentorship she received from veteran fintech investor Matt Harris with learning how to be what she calls a “classic venture investor.”
Era Ventures has already backed 10 startups including HoneyHomes, a subscription service for handymen; Viabot, a robotics company that Peters called a Roomba for parking lots; and TrueHold, a startup that buys homes from seniors and leases them back.
The firm invests in startups from seed to Series B, with the average check ranging from $3 million to $5 million.
In addition to Peters, the firm is run by Raja Ghawi, an experienced construction investor who she brought on as a firm partner.