NY-Israeli VC Firm Presents Eight Startups at NYC Property-Technology Show

Dec 3, 2019 by Susan Rosenbluth

by Barry Shisgal

Over fifty companies exhibited at the November 2019 MIPIM PropTech show in New York City, offering innovative technology solutions for owners and managers of real estate properties. The MIPIM PropTechNYC show was one of New York City’s Real Estate Tech Week conferences and exhibits.

BuiltUp Ventures (builtupventures.com), based in Tel Aviv and NYC, provides Seed and Series-A VC funding for startups creating solutions for commercial real estate and multi-family properties (CRE/MF), retail chains, and supply chain ecosystems. The firm is currently raising a $50 million VC fund focusing on seed investments in Israeli startups with a strong US-market potential. Oded Eliashiv, one of the Managing Partners of BuiltUp Ventures, emphasized the active role BuiltUp Ventures plays in assisting its portfolio startups in development, growth, and marketing of their services in the US.

At the 2019 MIPIM PropTech NYC show, BuiltUp Ventures presented eight portfolio companies; AugMind, Innovesta, MTtech, MyTower, SkySaver, SolidBlock, Swathly, and Xtate.

MyTower (MyTowerApp.com), a unified all-in-one innovative property management platform, offers a powerful yet intuitive property and hospitality management platform, delivering a great experience for both property management companies and their tenants. Compared to separated vertical services and solutions, which are very difficult to manage, MyTower offers a comprehensive, horizontally-integrated end-to-end solution for the real estate industry from a user-centric point of view. It is all about maximizing stakeholder experience and efficiency along the chain, reducing the costs of the management companies.

Pini Shemesh, one of the founders of MyTower, described the company’s overall objective as making the experience of managing a large portfolio of properties, and the experience of renting a unit in such a portfolio, pleasant and frictionless. The MyTower property management system is currently used in Israel by hundreds of multi-unit high-rise property owners, with tens of thousands of residential units. MyTower fully integrates with legacy property management accounting platforms, such as Yardi, and offers landlords and residents a whole new level of capabilities and ease of use. The system offers four modules: The Property Management module simplifies lease management and management of scheduled and recurring requirements. The Maintenance Management module simplifies the creation, outsourcing, and tracking of maintenance tickets, and enables tenants to make access arrangements for guests from the convenience of their mobile app. The Services and Amenities module allows tenants to schedule room service, spa use, housekeeping, laundry etc., streamlining the use of these amenities while giving management billing and reporting capabilities for the incremental revenue streams generated by these services and amenities. The AppConnect module enables the MyTower system to connect to existing third party or future modules offering simple API integration with smart locks, biometric access systems, CCTV systems, VoIP phone and intercom systems, smart home systems, parking management, etc.

The MyTower system enables property management offices to take on many more properties with their existing human resources, while streamlining their workflow. The US market potential for MyTower’s services is estimated to be hundreds of millions of dollars.

MyTower’s platform consists of four fully integrated modules, which the company describes as follows:

• A Property Management module: Easing property management via Smart Building Technology. MyTower achieves this by allowing proactive and preventive maintenance coupled with the efficient use of resources. The BI (Business Intelligence) platform anticipates needs and adapts to changing circumstances, and more.
• A Service Management module: A CRM system is used to manage residents, visitors, vehicles and deliveries, allowing for better tenant communication. This enables them to easily make payments, report maintenance issues and more.
• An On-Demand Services / Concierge Assistance module: Countless service providers are available on demand, such as room service, spa treatments, housekeeping, laundry and delivery services, ecologic car wash and more.
• An Integration Store / AppConnect module: A world of upgrades and seamless integrations, with mobile facial recognition-based self-check-in. The app is connected to leak sensors and proactive maintenance for shared and private areas, API integration and other endless solutions.

SolidBlock (SolidBlock.co), another BuiltUp Ventures portfolio company, offers turnkey Blockchain based real estate asset tokenization services. To the uninitiated, this could sound complicated, but according to Yuval Wirzberger and Yael Tamar, the founders of SolidBlock, it’s as simple as this: “SolidBlock enables owners or buyers of real estate properties and portfolios to finance, refinance, or partially-liquidate the asset by issuing and selling fully-compliant Blockchain based cryptographic security tokens representing fractional ownership interest in the property or the portfolio.” In other words, SolidBlock manages the entire process from start to finish. SolidBlock is also in the process of building a Blockchain based exchange designed specifically for primary-market (issuing) and secondary-market (trading) of cryptographic real-estate-backed security tokens and cryptographic fractional ownership units. SolidBlock works together with lenders, underwriters, securities law and compliance professionals, KYC/AML services, licensed broker-dealers, cryptocurrency exchanges, trust and custodial services and loan servicing and property management providers to provide the full scope of services needed to deliver the primary offering and enable secondary trading.

SolidBlock’s cryptographic real estate financing and refinancing solutions provide many advantages over traditional financing and refinancing solutions. SolidBlock and its network of service providers orchestrate the underwriting process and oversee ongoing verification and reporting. SolidBlock’s mezzanine lenders and underwriters can provide fast non-recourse funding for financing or refinancing properties, while SolidBlock prepares an STO, a cryptographic Security Token Offering, that will then be used to sell fractional ownership interest to investors.

SolidBlock’s solutions offer a new and robust source of liquidity for real estate owners and are scalable; from properties of a few million dollars, to portfolios worth billions of dollars. Traditional real-estate-backed financing burdens owners with tedious mortgage underwriting and cumbersome interest payments from day-one. However, physically finding equity investors, i.e. new partners, for partial liquidity of real estate assets is often a tedious and unreliable endeavor. SolidBlock’s Private Placement based Security Token Offerings enable property owners to liquidate a portion of their equity and sell it as a commodity on a first-come-first-served basis into a broad international market base of investors.

Last year, in August 2018, SolidBlock helped Elevated Returns, aka ER Global, recapitalize some of their equity in the $225 million St. Regis Aspen Resort, utilizing an $18 million security token offering of the Ethereum based AspenCoin Security Token. SolidBlock’s STO process is similar to an IPO, where new investors participate in dividends and distributions and benefit from the long-term appreciation of the underlying asset. SolidBlock’s cryptographic asset tokenization also provides liquidity to investors, who can resell all or some of their tokens, or digital shares, on Blockchain exchanges.

Israel has the largest number of startups per capita in the world, earning it the nickname “Startup Nation”. With a population of around 8.5 million, Israel has around one startup per 1,400 people. Notable Israeli startup exits include Waze (sold to Google for $1.3 billion), Mellanox (sold to NVIDIA for $6.9 billion), Mobileye (sold to Intel for $15.3 billion), Checkpoint (CHKP, with 5,000 employees and a $17 billion market cap), and many more. The website www.israelimappedinny.com shows over 300 Israeli startups and venture capital firms operating in the Greater New York City area.