He spent years analyzing real estate deals from the inside. Now he builds the software that runs the buildings.
Donglai Du runs Spacesforce, a Chengdu-based company betting that the office building of the future is one you can manage from a screen.
Spacesforce, known in Chinese as 空间原力, is a cloud platform aimed at the people who run commercial property: leasing teams, project managers and asset managers. Instead of tracking occupancy, maintenance and tenant satisfaction across separate spreadsheets and phone calls, Du's pitch is a single system that ties leasing operations, project management and asset management together. The company describes itself as a SaaS and IoT platform for smart, connected real estate.
The premise comes straight from Du's own frustration with how the industry worked. Before Spacesforce, he sat inside one of China's largest developers, Vanke, as a project investment analyst, where the day-to-day of managing assets meant a lot of manual work. His stated goal for the company is direct: to let asset management "break free from tedious manual work, reducing costs and improving efficiency."
The business model is deliberately unglamorous. Spacesforce charges on a subscription basis, in the range of roughly 0.24 to 0.5 yuan per square meter per month, and sells primarily to asset management firms in China's first-tier and emerging first-tier cities. The platform layers in real-time tenant satisfaction feedback and AI-driven analytics so operators can make decisions with data rather than instinct.
Enable asset management to break free from tedious manual work, reducing costs and improving efficiency.
By the time Spacesforce raised its early funding, the company was already covering roughly 1.2 million square feet of space, serving technology campuses, office buildings and co-working brands across cities including Chengdu, Beijing, Shanghai, Suzhou and Guiyang. Its client list has included major property operators such as Longhu, Shimao and Zhongtian. An angel round from real estate industry investors pushed the company's valuation toward 100 million yuan, and the team signaled plans to keep raising to fund product development and market expansion.
Du's resume reads like a company being assembled one discipline at a time. He studied finance as an undergraduate at Juniata College in Pennsylvania, then crossed into property with a Master of Science in Real Estate Development from Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. His early professional years were spent on the deal side of Chinese real estate, including at Vanke and, according to his profile, roles connected to firms like DTZ and the real estate finance world.
That combination matters for a proptech founder. Du has leased and analyzed the same kind of assets that Spacesforce now serves, which gives the product a builder who has lived on the customer's side of the table. He co-founded the company with Mike Zhang, who holds a dual NYU degree in economics and psychology and previously worked at JP Morgan and Ralph Lauren, pairing a real estate operator with a finance-and-consumer partner.
Spacesforce frames commercial real estate operations as three connected layers. The product is designed to unify them rather than leave each in its own tool.
The through-line is data. Real-time feedback from office tenants and AI-powered analytics are meant to help operators optimize resources and, in the company's words, maximize asset value - turning a building from a static holding into something closer to a live, measurable system.
Du has studied and lived in the United States - rural Pennsylvania and New York City - before building his company back in Chengdu.
Spacesforce sells software the way landlords think about space: as a monthly rate per square meter, from about 0.24 to 0.5 yuan.
His co-founder Mike Zhang came from JP Morgan and Ralph Lauren with an NYU degree, balancing Du's real estate operating background.
He is the co-founder and CEO of Spacesforce (空间原力), a Chengdu-based commercial real estate technology company that builds SaaS and IoT tools for building operators.
Spacesforce is a cloud platform for commercial real estate that connects leasing operations, project management and asset management, aimed at reducing manual work and improving efficiency for landlords and asset managers.
He studied finance at Juniata College, earned a Master of Science in Real Estate Development at Columbia University, and worked as a project investment analyst at Vanke before founding Spacesforce.
The company is headquartered in Chengdu, Sichuan, China, and has served buildings in cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Suzhou and Guiyang.
Multiple professional profile sources report that he was named to Forbes China's 30 Under 30 list as an entrepreneur.
This profile is compiled from public sources including LinkedIn, Crunchbase, 36Kr and company materials. Some details, such as Forbes China 30 Under 30 recognition, are reported by professional profile aggregators. Facts that could not be verified have been omitted or qualified.