KP Reddy

Not many (or any?) proptech startups have been founded by a civil engineer, but Shadow Ventures, a seed-stage tech venture capital firm, can make that claim.

Founded in 2018, the Atlanta-based Shadow Ventures is led by KP Reddy, who earned a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he later ran the university’s tech incubator. Reddy also wrote a textbook on building information management, BIM for Building Owners and Developers, which along with a serially successful entrepreneurial career put him on his path to becoming a tech VC.

One might say that Reddy has engineered Shadow Ventures’ growth well, with the VC firm numbering some two dozen startups in its portfolio, including well-known proptech startups such as Aren, Icon and Stake. The VC focuses on investing in pre-seed and seed startups where there’s much more technical and market risks.

“If you look at revenue as being the sword and defensibility being the shield, the business startups always take longer and more cash than you need,” Reddy said in a Commercial Observer interview in May. “We try to target companies that, if they can solve the big technical problems, the market is there.”

In June, investors took additional note of Shadow Ventures’ success, as the VC raised its $34 million Seed Fund II, about which Reddy is quite proud.

“We raised our latest fund in probably one of the toughest fundraising environments ever,” he said. “I think we’ve continued to stay very disciplined and committed to our mission. We haven’t gone off and done things like climate as a subset of our mission. We haven’t gone off and done crypto. We have stayed very focused on solving the big problems of the industry.

“And I think we’ve continued to get more people into the tent with us, like our strategic leverage partners. We continue to believe in the mission and in the cause: to fund great founders that are solving real problems. I think that, in many ways, we’ve stayed true to our mission over the last five years.”