Proptech Firm VendorPM Closes $20 Million Series A Round

Manhattan-based Prudence is an early-stage venture capital firm investing in technology companies looking to transform global real estate.

VendorPM plans to use the money in large part to further expand into the Chicago market, as well as to enter Washington, D.C., said Emiel Bril, CEO of VendorPM.

“There’s really three core areas,” said Bril. “The first is the geographic expansion. Obviously, expanding across the country, it’s not cheap. We’re setting up market pods instead of a traditional structure where you have your sales, customer service and financing teams. We’re setting up teams focused on each geographic city in order to successfully launch and win those cities.

“The second piece is building out a world-class leadership team. That’s predominantly focused on our [vice president] suite right now. Lastly, it’s significant investments in products. Similar to the geographic pods, we’re setting up pods for the product team. Up until now, we just had one product team operating on a linear product roadmap. Now we’re going to have a team focused on building for vendors, a team for property managers, payments integrations and so on.”

Founded in January 2020, VendorPM came out of Bril’s adolescent experience in running his own window-cleaning business, he said.

“I started my first business when I was 14 years old, going door-to-door selling window-cleaning services in Toronto,” he said. “I grew that business throughout high school and university, and eventually found myself selling to property managers. I’d be servicing condo buildings, apartment buildings, office buildings, and I couldn’t believe the amount of money they were spending on a service like window cleaning. So it got me thinking about just how large this industry is. It’s over $500 billion spent annually in North America on vendors to service their properties.

“That whole workflow is very manual and inefficient — email, Excel, and word of mouth. I saw the real pain points on both the vendor side and the property management side, which is how VendorPM came about.”

In its short history, VendorPM has gained prominent incumbent real estate users and investors, due to its addressing “massive inefficiencies” in the property manager-vendor dynamic, said Bril.

“Number one, you could look at the data and it would speak for itself,” he said. “The growth is there, the retention is there. We’re clearly driving value and solving a real problem here. The second thing is the simple fact that you could talk to our users and they would tell you qualitatively, not just quantitatively, that there’s a real problem to be solved. There is a massive inefficiency. It’s a real gap in the market and it comes down to a very simple and easy-to-use solution that solves a big problem. That’s what we’ve done.”

The VendorPM SaaS platform and marketplace supports more than 5,000 buildings and close to 40,000 service vendors, as well as 120-plus property management groups across the U.S. and Canada. The company claims that regardless of asset class, it is the most efficient way to obtain multiple bids across every building service and simplify the many steps that come before and after. Commercial real estate organizations and property management users include Colliers (CIGI), Golub & Company, Avison Young, and BentallGreenOak.

Philip Russo can be reached at prusso@commercialobserver.com.