commercial-real-estate
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The Depression-Era Passbook Bank That Grew Into an $80 Billion Northeast Powerhouse
Started with $25,000 in Depression-era Waterbury, Webster now runs $80 billion in assets and a national health-savings business - and just agreed to sell itself to Santander for $12.3 billion.
CBRE Is Quietly Becoming the Operating System for the Physical Economy
The world’s largest commercial real estate services company is turning brokerage relationships into a sprawling, data-rich machine for running buildings, projects and capital. Its real product is continuity - from choosing a site to keeping the lights on.
The $80 Billion Bank That Started in a Chinatown Storefront
East West Bank spent five decades turning a Chinatown savings and loan into the financial bridge between the United States and Asia. Today it holds about $80 billion in assets - and still answers the phone in the language you grew up speaking.
The Landlord's Lender: How Arbor Turned Apartment Loans Into a $36 Billion Machine
For four decades Arbor has bet on the least glamorous corner of real estate - the mid-size apartment building - and built a lender that hands owners money on day one and still gets paid a decade later.
Newmark
Newmark does not need to own the skyline to make money from it. The 97-year-old firm has built a modern commercial real estate machine around the decisions that happen before, during and long after a building changes hands.
Regus
Mark Dixon turned a plain observation - real business happening at cafe tables - into Regus, the flexible-office network that now spans thousands of locations and quietly outlasted the startup that was supposed to bury it.
Cushman & Wakefield
A 108-year-old brokerage that started managing Manhattan skyscrapers now moves $9.4 billion of real estate advice a year - and quietly runs the buildings you work in.
Fidelity National Financial
Fidelity National Financial sits beneath the closing table, turning courthouse records, escrow instructions and fraud checks into something buyers and lenders can trust. Its scale is the story - but so is the software quietly changing how that trust gets made.
Bank OZK
From two branches and $28 million in assets, Bank OZK built a $41.7 billion institution by pairing community banking with a national construction-lending machine. Now the Little Rock bank is trying to keep that edge while making its balance sheet less dependent on real estate.
Benji Baer
At CBRE, Benji Baer turned a career spent marketing financial products into a mandate to make real estate legible, measurable and culturally relevant. Her method joins brand ambition to operational accountability - with room for grit, flexibility and the people doing the work.
PropRise
PropRise is a San Francisco AI company (YC S23) building software for institutional commercial real estate teams. Its two live products, Primer and Beacon, automate the Excel-heavy grind of dealmaking: Primer turns offering memos, rent rolls and T-12s into underwriting models with every number cited back to its source, while Beacon scans roughly 450,000 U.S. trade areas to surface self-storage sites that match a firm's buy-box. Founded by ex-Stripe machine-learning and engineering leads, PropRise is used by teams behind $50B+ in CRE, including Bain Capital, Colliers and Public Storage.
RentFlow
RentFlow is a New York fintech, part of Y Combinator's Summer 2024 batch, that builds a 'Buy Now, Pay Later' layer for commercial rent. It pays landlords their full rent on the 1st of the month, then lets business tenants repay in smaller installments synced to their real cash flow. The company pairs payments infrastructure with AI underwriting that reads transaction-level and behavioral signals to price flexibility, aiming to keep otherwise-healthy small and medium businesses from being pushed into default by a single fixed lump-sum bill.
GoWork
GoWork is Indonesia's largest network of premium coworking and flexible office spaces, offering hot desks, dedicated desks, private offices, virtual offices, meeting rooms and event venues across malls and office towers in Jakarta, Tangerang, Bali, Surabaya and Medan. Founded in 2016 as Rework and formed through a 2018 merger with the original GoWork, the company serves freelancers, startups, SMEs and enterprises with a mix of physical space, a booking app and business-support services such as company incorporation and mail handling.
Smarten Spaces
Smarten Spaces is a Singapore-founded proptech company that builds AI, IoT and big-data software for managing hybrid workplaces and commercial real estate. Its flagship platform - marketed as Jumpree and, more recently, SpaceOnAI - lets enterprises book desks and meeting rooms on 3D floor maps, forecast space demand, roster teams, and analyze how offices are actually used. Founded in 2017 by former Cisco India president Dinesh Malkani, the company serves Fortune 500 clients across 30+ countries and integrates deeply with Microsoft Teams.
Chase Garbarino
Chase Garbarino is the co-founder and CEO of HqO, a Boston-based proptech company whose software helps commercial landlords manage the tenant and workplace experience across hundreds of buildings worldwide. Before HqO, he built and sold Streetwise Media, the company behind local innovation-news brands like BostInno and AmericanInno, and later founded VentureApp. A lifelong Boston sports fan and runner with an entrepreneurial streak going back to reselling Pogs in fifth grade, Garbarino has spent more than a decade using technology to build networks and communities for startups, small businesses, and now the commercial real estate industry.
CompStak
CompStak is a New York-based commercial real estate data and analytics company that runs a crowdsourced marketplace where brokers, appraisers and researchers trade verified lease and sale comps for credits. Founded in 2012 by former broker Michael Mandel and engineer Vadim Belobrovka, it turns hard-to-find transaction details - starting rents, net effective rents, cap rates, net operating income - into structured, analyst-reviewed data used by many of the largest CRE investors, lenders and banks in the U.S.
HqO
HqO is a Boston-based property-technology company that builds a real estate experience (REX) software platform for commercial landlords and their tenants. Its platform combines a tenant app, an analytics and intelligence suite, a partner marketplace, and building-operations tools so office owners can measure and improve how people experience their buildings. Founded in 2018, HqO powers hundreds of properties and hundreds of millions of square feet across dozens of countries, and works with major landlords including Hines, Vornado, JLL, JP Morgan and Alexandria Real Estate Equities.
Jones
Jones is a New York-based vertical AI software company that automates insurance compliance for commercial real estate and construction. Its platform collects Certificates of Insurance (COIs), endorsements and policies, verifies coverage against requirements using AI agents, chases down gaps with vendors and tenants, and integrates bi-directionally with property and construction ERP systems. Founded in 2017 by Omri Stern and Michael Rudman, Jones manages insurance risk across roughly 2.7 billion square feet of properties and construction projects.
Lev
Lev is a New York-based software company building an AI-native platform for commercial real estate (CRE). Founded in 2019 by Yaakov Zar, it started as a tech-enabled financing marketplace connecting property sponsors and brokers with thousands of lenders, then evolved into a purpose-built system of apps, AI agents, and data that helps CRE professionals manage relationships, deals, documents, and lender outreach. Lev combines one of the industry's largest sources of real-time lender and market data with agentic automation that ingests calls, emails, and unstructured files to move deals forward faster.
Ownwell
Ownwell is an Austin-based real estate fintech that helps property owners lower their tax bills by automating the property tax appeal process. Combining local tax experts with AI and proprietary market data, Ownwell files appeals, gathers evidence, and represents owners at hearings on a no-savings, no-fee basis. Founded in 2020 by Colton Pace and Joseph Noor, the company has processed more than 1 million appeals and saved customers over $400 million, aiming to give everyday homeowners the same tax expertise that large investment firms use.
Spacesforce
Spacesforce (Chinese: 空间原力) is a Chengdu-based SaaS and IoT company building a data-intelligence platform for commercial real estate. Its cloud software connects leasing operations, project management and asset management so that landlords, office-building operators and coworking brands can run their space digitally rather than on spreadsheets. Founded in 2018 by Columbia-trained Donglai Du and NYU-trained Mike Zhang, the company helps traditional developers modernize how they track occupancy, tenants and building performance.
Stuf Storage
Stuf is a New York-based, tech-enabled self-storage company that partners with commercial and multifamily real estate owners to convert underused space - basements, garages, mechanical floors, vacant retail - into remotely managed, hospitality-inspired storage for the people and businesses nearby. Founded in 2020 by CEO Katharine Lau, Stuf runs a lean, app-driven operation across dense urban markets and shares revenue with landlord partners rather than owning or building traditional storage facilities.
Visitt
Visitt is an AI-native commercial real estate property operations platform that consolidates work orders, preventive maintenance, inspections, tenant communications, compliance and finance into a single interface. Founded in 2017 and headquartered in New York, it serves owners, operators and onsite teams managing office, industrial, multifamily, retail and data-center portfolios. In January 2026 the company raised a $22M Series B led by Susquehanna Growth Equity, following a year in which it grew square footage under management by more than 900%.
VTS
VTS is a New York-based commercial real estate technology company that builds the industry's leading leasing, asset management, tenant experience, and market data platform. Founded in 2012 as View the Space, it consolidates the workflows landlords, brokers, and property teams use to lease, operate, and understand buildings into a single cloud platform, and has increasingly repositioned around AI with products like VTS AI and Asset Intelligence. The platform spans more than 13 billion square feet of real estate and is used by most of the world's largest asset managers.
Donglai Du
Donglai Du is the co-founder and CEO of Spacesforce (空间原力), a Chengdu-based proptech company building SaaS and IoT tools that help commercial real estate operators manage leasing, projects and assets from one cloud platform. A Columbia University-trained real estate developer and former Vanke investment analyst, he started Spacesforce around 2018 to move asset management away from spreadsheets and manual work toward data-driven operations. The company has served office buildings, tech parks and co-working brands across cities including Chengdu, Beijing, Shanghai, Suzhou and Guiyang.
Itay Oren
Itay Oren is the co-founder and CEO of Visitt, an AI-native property operations platform for commercial real estate. He started the company in 2017 after working in business development for real estate firms in Israel, where he saw first-hand how fragmented and outdated building operations software had become. Under Oren, Visitt has grown to more than 150 customers across 310-plus cities and 10,000 properties, positioning itself as an early mover in embedding AI directly into the day-to-day work of property teams. In January 2026 the company raised a $22 million Series B led by Susquehanna Growth Equity to build what Oren calls a single AI interface for CRE operations.
Katharine Lau
Katharine Lau is the CEO and co-founder of Stuf, a tech-enabled self-storage company that turns underused space inside commercial buildings into neighborhood storage. She started Stuf in New York in 2020 after a pandemic spring-cleaning session exposed how clunky and inconvenient traditional storage had become. Before Stuf, Lau led real estate growth at the shared-workspace company Industrious and worked across institutional and proptech real estate. Stuf has raised roughly $12.8 million, including an $11 million Series A in 2023, and operates in major U.S. metros from New York to Seattle.
Density
Density is a San Francisco-based people-analytics company that builds privacy-first sensors and software to measure how offices, buildings, and other spaces are actually used in real time. Founded in 2014 by Andrew Farah, it pairs radar and depth-sensing hardware with its Atlas analytics platform to help enterprises cut real estate costs, plan hybrid workplaces, and understand utilization without cameras or personally identifiable data. Backed by more than $225 million in funding and a $1.05 billion valuation, Density serves Fortune 500 customers across dozens of countries.
InvestorFlow
InvestorFlow is a San Francisco-based software company that builds a purpose-built CRM and investor portal for private markets firms - private equity, private credit and real assets managers. Built on Salesforce and layered with AI, its platform unifies fundraising (capital formation), deal sourcing and execution (capital deployment), and LP engagement and reporting (investor services) in one place. Formed through the 2022 merger of InvestorFlow's investor portal with the Blackstone-incubated FundEngine CRM (Cloud Theory) and backed by a $30M Series A from Ambina Partners, the company serves more than 200 alternative asset managers - including 25 of the top 50 - representing over $6 trillion in assets, 750 funds and 90,000 LPs.
AirGarage
AirGarage is a San Francisco-based, full-stack parking management company that helps real estate owners turn parking lots and garages into higher-yielding assets. It combines software - dynamic pricing, license plate recognition cameras, mobile payments and a real-time owner dashboard - with on-the-ground operations like enforcement, maintenance and marketing, all under a revenue-share model. Founded in 2017 by three Arizona State University students, the company manages 400+ parking locations across 40+ states and has served more than 11 million drivers.