commercial-real-estate
(19)
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.
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.
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2017 after working in business development for real estate firms in Israel, where he saw first-hand how fragmented and outdated building operations software had become.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.
Michael Mandel
Michael Mandel is the co-founder and CEO of CompStak, a New York-based commercial real estate data platform that crowdsources lease and sale comparables from brokers, appraisers, and researchers, then sells verified analytics to landlords, lenders, and investors. A former Grubb & Ellis broker who got tired of chaotic Monday-morning comp-swaps, he launched CompStak in 2012 with Vadim Belobrovka and has since raised roughly $89M and built a national platform used across every major U.S. market.
Nick Romito
Nick Romito is the co-founder and CEO of VTS, the commercial real estate leasing and asset management platform based in New York. A former broker who rebuilt the tools he wished he had as a tenant rep, he grew VTS from a demo tape of office space walk-throughs into a system of record used across billions of square feet of global CRE.
Yaakov Zar
Yaakov Zar is the founder and CEO of Lev, a New York company rebuilding how commercial real estate gets financed. He started Lev in 2019 after watching a $4 million loan crawl through six months of email, faxes and paperwork - and decided a $200-billion-a-year industry running on 1990s process deserved better software. Lev began as a tech-enabled brokerage connecting borrowers to nearly 10,000 lenders, raised more than $200 million, then pivoted into an AI-powered CRM and agentic workflow platform for brokers, lenders and sponsors. Before Lev, Zar co-founded Dispatch, a workforce platform sold to Vista Equity Partners in 2018.
Perry Gershon
Perry Gershon is the CEO of FTN (For The Numbers) Network, the fantasy-sports, sports-betting and DVOA data company he bought into and now leads. A Yale-trained molecular biophysicist who spent 25 years as a heavyweight commercial real estate lender, he opened one of New York City's first sports bars in 1987, then walked away from finance to run twice for Congress in New York's 1st District. In late 2023 he took the helm of FTN and led a $3M seed round, betting that the numbers behind sports are a business as much as a pastime.
Remen Okoruwa
Remen Okoruwa is the co-founder and CEO of Propexo, a Y Combinator-backed Boston startup building a unified API for property management software. Pitched as 'Plaid for commercial real estate,' Propexo lets engineers connect to legacy systems like Yardi, RealPage and Entrata in days instead of months. An Iowa kid who studied engineering at Harvard, Remen took a winding road through McKinsey, a churn-fighting data startup, product leadership at HubSpot, and a rent-payments venture before landing on the unglamorous but enormous problem of moving property data. He now powers integrations behind more than half of the NMHC Top 15 managers.
Bryan Bennett
Bryan Bennett is the CEO and founder of Cortex (formerly Cortex Building Intelligence, now Cortex Sustainability Intelligence), a New York-based software company that uses machine learning to cut energy use, costs, and carbon emissions in commercial buildings. Raised in a family that worked commercial real estate for four decades and trained as a management consultant advising utilities on smart-grid technology, Bennett built Cortex around a simple observation: buildings generate thousands of data points every minute, and almost no one was turning that data into action. His software-only platform now optimizes more than 50 million square feet, including the Empire State Building.
John Meadows
John Meadows is the co-founder and co-CEO of Bowery Valuation, a New York-based proptech company building the first vertically integrated appraisal-tech platform for commercial real estate. A certified appraiser who valued more than $3 billion of property at BBG before he turned 30, Meadows left the legacy appraisal world in 2015 to rebuild it from scratch with partners Noah Isaacs and Cesar Devers. He runs the company as a co-CEO partnership, has raised over $80 million in venture funding, and treats company culture as a system to be engineered rather than a slogan.
Joselyn Lai
Joselyn Lai is the co-founder and CEO of Bedrock Energy, an Austin-based climate-tech company drilling deep, autonomous geothermal wells to heat and cool large commercial buildings for a fraction of conventional cost and land. After a decade across sustainable agriculture, transportation, and consulting, she paired up with oil-and-gas drilling scientist Silviu Livescu to repurpose upstream drilling techniques for the half-kilometer of free thermal energy sitting beneath every building. In January 2025 the company raised a $12M Series A led by Titanium Ventures to scale projects across Texas and the Mountain West.
Kevin Song
Kevin Song is the founder and CEO of withco, a New York-based company helping small business owners buy the buildings they rent through a lease-to-own model. The son of Korean immigrants whose Brooklyn grocery store was lost when a landlord doubled the rent, Song turned that family loss into a venture-backed mission: turn tenants into owners. A Cornell economics graduate and former J.P. Morgan analyst named to Forbes 30 Under 30 for social entrepreneurship, he raised more than $30 million from Founders Fund, Canaan, NFX and Initialized, plus backers including Venus Williams, Kevin Durant, Will Smith's Dreamers VC and former HUD Secretary Julian Castro.
Mark Murphy
Mark Murphy is the co-founder and CEO of Banner (withbanner.com), a New York proptech building the capital-expenditure operating system for commercial real estate. After years in real estate finance at Goldman Sachs and RBC Capital Markets, he watched institutional owners run billion-dollar capital projects on spreadsheets, email threads, and disconnected tools, and started Banner in 2019 with college friend Kunal Chaudhary to replace that mess with one platform. Backed by Y Combinator (S19), Blackstone, Fifth Wall, Pruven Capital and Basis Set Ventures, Banner raised a $10M Series A in October 2023 and now oversees more than $10 billion in capital spend for operators like Starwood Capital, LivCor, Morgan Properties and Industrious.
Noam Ben-Zvi
Noam Ben-Zvi is the co-founder and CEO of Placer.ai, the location intelligence platform that turns anonymized phone movement into hard numbers for retailers, landlords, and city planners. He sold his first company, BlueTail, to Salesforce in 2012, then started Placer in 2016. By 2024 the company crossed $100M ARR and raised at a $1.5B valuation.
Mike Sroka
Mike Sroka is the CEO and co-founder of Dealpath, the leading deal management platform for institutional real estate investors. Founded in 2014 alongside Andy Lee and Kenter Wu, Dealpath has grown to support over $10 trillion in real estate transactions, raised $75M in total funding including a Morgan Stanley-led $43M Series C, and counts Blackstone, Nuveen, UBS, and MetLife among its clients. Sroka's background spans real estate finance at Hudson Advisors and growth roles at venture-backed software companies including Zynga and Fanhood, giving him a rare dual fluency in capital markets and product development. He serves on Blackstone's PropTech Advisory Board and is a vocal advocate for AI-powered deal workflow automation in commercial real estate.
Andrew Farah
Andrew Farah is the CEO and co-founder of Density, a San Francisco-based company that builds anonymous, privacy-first sensors to measure how physical spaces are actually used. What started in 2014 as a fix for a coffee shop line problem in upstate New York has grown into a $1B+ enterprise used by Fortune 500 companies across 1.25 billion square feet globally. Farah has raised over $217 million from investors including Kleiner Perkins, Founders Fund, and Altimeter Capital, and has built Density into what he calls 'Google Analytics for the built world.'
Cameron Steele
Cameron Steele is the Co-Founder and CEO of Prophia, an AI-powered data intelligence platform for commercial real estate that manages over 330 million square feet of assets. With a 30-year career spanning Oracle, Royal Bank of Canada, private equity, buuteeq (sold to Booking Holdings for $135M), OpenTable, and Booking.com, Steele brings rare cross-disciplinary depth to PropTech. He co-founded Prophia in 2018 to fix what he identified as a fundamental data crisis in one of the world's largest asset classes - an industry where 53% of rent rolls contain material financial errors and leading firms were still managing contractual data with pre-internet manual services.