How $16.7B in 2025 Proptech Funding Is Rewiring Commercial Real Estate

Proptech is no longer defined by marketplace apps, front-end workflows or digital conveniences. In 2025, the most meaningful transformation in real estate technology happened underneath the surface, in the systems that manage capital, construction, energy, underwriting and financial operations across the built world.

A year-end analysis by the Center for Real Estate Technology & Innovation (CRETI) found that proptech has entered a new phase of institutionalization. Venture and private-credit investors deployed roughly $16.7 billion into commercial real estate, construction and infrastructure technology in 2025, marking one of the most disciplined and strategically concentrated funding years in the sector’s history. These rounds are no longer exploratory or experimental. The companies raising capital are building the financial and operational backbone of modern real estate portfolios.

The shift is structural, but it is not driven by capital alone. Large owners, operators and lenders have spent the last decade standardizing their core platforms. With accounting, property management, construction management and data warehouses now in place, they are increasingly able to buy best-in-breed technology rather than whatever is easiest to integrate. At the same time, advances in artificial intelligence have made it possible for startups to ship commercial-ready products much earlier in their life cycle. The winners are those who can pair robust functionality with deep vertical specificity, plugging into sophisticated enterprise stacks that already exist.

Capital is following that reality. Investment is flowing into platforms that directly influence underwriting accuracy, asset income, project delivery and energy performance. Seed rounds, which once validated basic product market fit, now function as institutional entry points. Growth rounds increasingly resemble infrastructure financings, backed by structured credit and long-duration revenue streams tied to physical assets. Across every category of the built world, investors are prioritizing companies with direct leverage over cash flow, risk and operational precision.

CRETI’s 2025 data set shows this with unusual clarity. Across the year, the largest financings moved toward infrastructure-grade models. Base Power raised $1 billion, Enpal secured a $698 million debt facility, Palmetto raised $420 million, and Kiavi locked in a $400 million securitization, while TAB raised $676 million to support bridge lending in the United Kingdom. Each reflects the same thesis: Platforms that behave like utilities, aggregating demand, underwriting risk, and controlling distribution, attract the highest-conviction capital.

Construction technology followed a similar trajectory. Investors backed systems that convert jobsite ambiguity into verifiable data for lenders, owners and project teams. Companies such as Acelab ($16 million Series A), CYVL ($14 million Series A), ConCentric ($10 million Series A), LightYX ($11 million) and Spacial ($10 million) secured funding by demonstrating their ability to document progress, reduce rework, and compress pay-app cycles. The underlying pattern is accelerating: Investors want construction intelligence that produces lender-acceptable evidence, not optional workflow enhancements.

Within commercial real estate operations, capital gravitated toward platforms that control financial infrastructure. Vantaca’s $300 million growth round and Baselane’s $20 million Series B underscore investor preference for systems that centralize payments, receivables, accounting and compliance. Arch ($52 million) raised on the strength of its ability to automate treasury workflows, rent collection and investor reporting, while GreenLite ($49.5 million) applies AI-powered private plan review to reduce permitting timelines by up to 75 percent — improvements that directly impact project timing, cost certainty and net operating income.

This backdrop has made vertical expertise more valuable on the investor side as well. As enterprise buyers become more comfortable with complex technology and as AI makes it easier to build powerful products quickly, founders benefit most from partners who understand the nuances of the category they are selling into. Vertical-specific, value-add investors are increasingly shaping who wins.

That dynamic is visible in recent activity. JLL Spark Global Ventures led an investment in Jeeva AI, a company building domain-specific functionality for real estate workflows. JLL Spark and Camber Creek both invested in Ren Systems, backing a vertically focused operating platform for the sector. 

In the other direction, companies that appear horizontal on the surface are targeting real estate more deliberately because they now see real demand, readiness and a large attainable market. EliseAI, for instance, started in real estate, has expanded into health care, and is now backed by newer, more generalist investors who still view real estate as a core wedge.

The result is not a clean divide between horizontal and vertical technology, but a convergence around vertical outcomes. Even platforms with general purpose AI or workflow engines are being pulled toward real estate-specific product lines, data models and integrations because that is where sophisticated customers and clear business cases exist. Defensibility depends less on claiming to be a horizontal AI platform and more on owning the data loops, integrations and enterprise credibility inside a given vertical.

The maturation of the category is reshaping investor behavior. Venture firms that once waited for late-stage traction are now entering earlier, competing for ownership in companies with deep integrations and defensible architectures. These early-stage rounds increasingly resemble traditional Series A financings in size, diligence and expectations. CRETI analysis shows that one in three seed rounds in 2025 included at least one institutional co-lead, a sharp departure from historical norms.

The driver of this shift remains economic performance. Institutional owners expect technology partners to deliver direct, quantifiable improvements such as eliminating discrepancies that distort rent rolls, automating workflows that reduce operating expenses, tightening underwriting that reduces bad debt, and compressing construction timelines that influence internal rates of return. Companies capable of delivering measurable impact, and proving it in data, are capturing the majority of new capital.

The implications are evident across the sector.

In construction, intelligence platforms are reducing change-order risk and providing lenders with real-time field verification.

In housing finance, alternative credit platforms are using structured capital to expand lending capacity and improve underwriting precision.

In property operations, financial operating systems are consolidating the back office, replacing manual accounting, payment flows and document processing with automated, audit-grade systems that slot into existing cores.

Investors are rewarding companies with defensible distribution, embedded integrations and strong data loops, not generic proptech layers that sit outside core operations. At the same time, seemingly horizontal companies are building real estate-specific modules because the vertical has become both technologically capable and commercially attractive. The result is a bifurcated market: A small cohort of infrastructure-grade proptech companies is compounding quickly, often with specialist investors at the table, while the long tail faces slower raises, valuation pressure or consolidation.

Fundraising expectations have fundamentally shifted. Proptech startups are no longer evaluated solely on product market fit. They are now expected to demonstrate enterprise readiness, integration pathways, measurable return on investment and system-level defensibility as early as the seed stage. Seed is no longer an experiment. It is the institutional starting line.

For the commercial real estate industry, the next decade of innovation will be shaped by vertical, domain-specific platforms that deliver operational accuracy, financial consistency and infrastructure-level reliability, built on top of enterprise stacks that are finally ready to support them. The companies leading these rounds — across energy, construction, finance and property operations — are building the operating systems of the built environment.

Proptech is becoming the new infrastructure of real estate. And the firms that recognize this shift early, on both the customer and investor side, will define the industry’s next generation of winners.

Ashkán Zandieh is the founder and managing director at the Center for Real Estate Technology & Innovation (CRETI). Ajey Kaushal is a principal at JLL Spark Global Venture and a venture member at CRETI.

CLARIFICATION: This op-ed was updated to correctly reflect what Arch does.