Clelia Warburg Peters

As the intellectual force behind Era Ventures, a New York-based venture capital firm founded four years ago, Clelia Warburg Peters aims to apply new technologies to traditional real estate businesses. 

“We like to say we invest in innovation in the physical world — innovation around real estate, construction, industrial, logistics,” she said. “I’ve been investing in this category for a long time, like a dozen years, and think this is probably the most exciting time to be investing in this category.” 

Even though the firm has only four employees, Warburg Peters has raised a $90 million investment fund by cultivating relationships with a network of limited partners — classic venture capital players, foundations, endowments, family offices — while also leveraging her previous experience working at Bain Capital to finance projects she believes are on the cutting edge.  

“We really invest primarily for financial returns, not strategic returns, and that I think sometimes means that we have a slightly wider aperture in terms of what we’re looking at,” she said. “We like to say that in any sector-focused category, you can either improve an existing value chain or look to transform the industry itself, and Era Ventures definitely biases more toward deep transformation.”

One transformative deal the firm has made includes investing in LongMark Group (formerly TrueHold), a company that aims to help seniors age in place and puts U.S. home prices on the blockchain. LongMark has created an asset-backed stablecoin that allows investors outside of the U.S. to place capital into the housing market and create what Warburg Peters believes “is going to be the next-generation alternative to a REIT.”   

“I think that this is probably the most exciting time to be investing in this category so far because many aspects of the physical world have really resisted innovation historically,” she said. “But I think that AI is going to be really transformative for many aspects of the physical world.”