Nuveen Leads $6M Funding Round for Proptech Platform Cove
Post-Series A money will go toward boosting the fast-growing D.C. company’s sales team
By Philip Russo July 25, 2024 9:00 am
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Cove, a property operations and tenant experience platform for real estate owners and operators, announced Thursday that it closed a $6 million post-Series A funding round.
Investment firm Nuveen Real Estate led the round with participation from a fund managed by property advisers ORG Portfolio Management and O’Shaughnessy Ventures, among others, according to a statement from Cove. The new investors join an existing investor cohort that includes Blackstone Innovations Investments and Kastle Systems.
Nuveen and Blackstone (BX) now provide Cove with two of the five largest global real estate investment managers as clients and financial backers, said Adam Segal, co-founder and CEO of Washington, D.C.-based Cove.
“I think that Nuveen made a portfolio decision,” Segal said of the new investor, with whom Cove has partnered over the last year. “They were very excited about how we have come together to work in their properties and thought that there was good alignment to support us in a financial way.”
Founded in 2013, Cove operates a digital platform that can enable landlords to replace multiple systems from different vendors with an integrated work order system, a tenant experience app, preventive maintenance, inspections, certificate of insurance tracking and other functions.
“Nuveen has evaluated and tested many products in the market, and we’ve become convinced that Cove’s superior technology and exceptional team offer the winning solution,” Jeanne Casey, global head of innovation and proptech for Nuveen, said. “Our investment demonstrates our conviction that Cove offers a best-in-class solution, capable of replacing disparate point solutions across large real estate portfolios like ours. We are committed to consolidating our systems, while simultaneously enhancing user experience and enabling continuous innovation across our assets.”
Cove will use the latest funding to bolster its sales force to keep up with the company’s growing client base.
“We’re putting more of a sales team in place,” said Segal. “We’ve grown organically at well over 2x over the last year, which was exciting from a growth perspective, and doing a lot of work on industrial, so we need more product development on that.” Along with the industrial sector, Cove is seeing a lot of growth in life sciences properties, he added.
The company is also thinking about expanding to the U.K. in the near future, as well as possibly raising another funding round in 2025, Segal said.
In June 2023, Cove received Realcomm’s Best Tech Innovation award for intelligent buildings alongside companies such as PremiseHQ, KODE Labs and Dealpath.
Segal credits Cove co-founder and CTO Jeremy Scott with giving the company its technological edge in property operations and tenant experience.
“Jeremy is the smartest person in proptech,” said Segal. “He was getting his Ph.D. in artificial intelligence in 2011 at MIT, and, for whatever reason, he dropped out and we did this together. Only half-jokingly I say that in product development engineering, horsepower is a big focus for us to be able to do these really complicated integrations to create the tech stack. It’s full soup to nuts. We want to build things natively and real estate wants to operate in a single place.”
Philip Russo can be reached at prusso@commercialobserver.com.
