David Eisenberg and Ryan Orley
Co-founders and managing directors at at Zigg Capital
Since co-founding Zigg Capital in 2018, David Eisenberg and Rylan Orley have overseen rapid growth to $400 million in assets under management as the duo seek to become major players in the crowded proptech space.
Zigg has scaled its portfolio while investing in a number of start-up real estate and construction companies in its short history, including Procore, Juniper Square, Openspace.ai, VTS, Matterport and Snapdocs. The COVID-19 pandemic took hold early on in the firm’s tenure, which Eisenberg noted only amplified the importance of providing real-time data for commercial real estate firms to track behavioral trends affected by the health crisis.
“The pandemic accelerated many of the trends that we had expected to play out over the course of the 2020s into a very short period of time,” Eisenberg said, “and it meaningfully accelerated trends related to e-commerce versus traditional retail, and it meaningfully changed the typical commuter’s point of view about how excited or willing they were to commute into an office job.
“A lot of what we invest in is automating manual processes. And I think when you were unable to access a physical file folder and your office, where you are unable to see somebody face to face during COVID, digital solutions came to the forefront and many of our portfolio companies saw enhanced growth during the COVID time period.”
Prior to launching Zigg, Eisenberg was global senior vice president at CBRE, which he joined after the brokerage giant’s acquisition of his CRE software company Floored. Prior to founding Floored, Eisenberg was an original team member of retail technology businesses TellApart (later acquired by Twitter) and Bonobos (later acquired by Walmart).
Orley previously worked as a managing partner with Millwell, a private equity firm focused on technology services. He also spent five years at Morgan Stanley’s special situations group.
“Our goal is to have the best-performing funds in the category over a meaningful period of time,” Eisenberg said of its proptech plans. “We expect that several of our companies will grow to be notable public businesses.” —A.C.
