Lane Closes $10M Series A Funding for Tenant Management Software
By Chava Gourarie June 11, 2020 3:21 pm
reprints
Tenant management startup Lane closed a $10 million Series A funding led by Round13 Capital, the startup announced.
Lane’s software offers landlords an integrated platform for managing all aspects of the tenant experience, including access, guest registration, parking, scheduling, and communications.
Other investors in the round include previous investors Alate Partners and Panache Ventures. The Toronto-based Lane will use funds to expand beyond its current markets, Canada and the United States, and double its 40-person team by the end of 2020, according to a statement from Lane.
“The modern office building is its own ecosystem,” Lane founder Clint Robinson told Commercial Observer. “You have retail, access control, display screens for office directories, register desks, a wellness and yoga program, parking programs.”
But back in 2014, when Robinson walked into a Brookfield (BN) Properties office building, he noticed that there was no technology to run it all. “They’re a leader in the industry, and they didn’t have any tech,” Robinson said. “I was blown away by the opportunity.”
Brookfield became Lane’s first client, and has implemented Lane in all of its buildings across the United States and Canada.
Lane has a suite of its own applications for regular functions like parking and access control, and also allows third party apps to plug into it. It operates on a subscription model, and is currently focused on building its client base.
Lane began its funding search in January, and the deal wrapped up in March, even as the country shut down to halt the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. “We were closing the deal during the pandemic, there were a number of opportunities to not go ahead,” said Round13 founder Bruce Croxon.
However, Croxon said he believes first of all that we will return to the office, and second, that landlords will need Lane more than ever, in order to communicate and manage all the anticipated changes. Lane can help landlords stagger tenant arrivals, offer food delivery for workers who won’t be able to dine out, rolling out contactless access, and communicate all the changes to tenants.
In addition, with tenants potentially moving to a hub-and-spoke model, there will be more need for fluid and flexible access options. “We think anyway that as people come and go more often and have less permanent workspaces, there will be more need for a platform like Lane,” said Croxon. “That’s what we’re banking on anyway.”
