Orbital Insight Raises $50M in Series D Funding

Orbital Insight, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based the geospatial analytics software company, closed a $50m Series D financing. The round was co-led by Sequoia Capital and Clearvision Ventures, with participation from new investors Invicta Growth, Bunge Ventures Ltd, Chevron Technology Ventures, Goldman Sachs, Tech Pioneers Fund, and others, and returning investors GV, Geodesic Capital, SKY Perfect JSAT, Intellectus Partners, and Lux Capital. The company, which has now secured over $125m in funding, int…

Boomers Want to Stay Home. Senior Housing Now Faces Budding Glut.

The rise of technologies that help the elderly stay in their homes threatens to upend one of commercial real estate’s biggest bets: Aging baby boomers will leave their residences in droves for senior housing. Developers and senior-housing companies have spent billions of dollars over the past five years to build facilities that provide housing, food, medical care and assistance for the elderly. While these properties have been filling up with people born during the Depression or World War I…

New Technology Promises to Curate the Perfect Retail Tenant Mix

Meet Branch: Announcing Our New Brand And Seed Raise

About a year ago, my co-founders and I quit our jobs to build better office furniture. We didn’t have much (any) experience in the furniture world, but our time in commercial real estate and startups had exposed us to some problems that needed fixing. We were convinced that growing companies deserved an end-to-end furnishing option that inspired their teams and adapted to their needs, without breaking the bank. Over the past year, we’ve accomplished a lot, but we’re just getting started. To that…

As Investments In PropTech Rise, VCs And Investors Bet $1.7B That The Gamble Is Worth It

With a group of people surrounding him, Neal Krajewski lifted up his cellphone with the screen facing toward the crowd, pointed the phone’s camera at an image on a banner, and within seconds, a video appeared. Krajewski, an Ormond Beach, Florida, real estate agent, was showing off how agents and commercial real estate brokers could use his augmented reality application, Captum, in their own virtual/video ads. “I’m not a tech guy but I had a vision,” Krajewski said to Bisnow while he was demonstr…

WeWork Details Its Turnaround Strategy Including Divestments And New (Old) Focus

WeWork is going back to its roots. In a repudiation of the excess of its erstwhile CEO Adam Neumann, WeWork announced Friday via an October 11-dated deck that it’s dropping The We Company’s push into activities that went past its “core” co-working business. Instead, it’s pivoting back to what it describes as its “pre-2017” model. The deck covers WeWork’s new 90-day “game plan” during which time it hopes to right itself. The strategy isn’t entirely a rerun of the past; WeWork anticipates improvem…

Trendy, functional ‘flexible office spaces’ are taking off

Flexible office space, once a niche offering, is experiencing a meteoric rise. In the last decade, so-called “flex space” increased more than 600 percent across the United States. Just in the last year, the market grew 23 percent in Manhattan alone, according to CBRE. While most people associate coworking with a flexible office, that’s just one type of company that takes advantage of its perks. The term “flexible” applies to both the lease agreement and the design of the space. Unlike traditiona…

How Industrial Giant Honeywell Is Taking Over Your Building’s Brain

Vimal Kapur leads the Honeywell International unit that manages commercial buildings. He met with Barron’s in a Manhattan high rise, of course, to explain how the company’s industrial Internet of Things, or IioT, platform called Honeywell Forge is transforming his division. Honeywell (ticker: HON) believes its long-term expertise in control technologies—such as the building systems Kapur is responsible for—gives it a leg up in developing software applications that not only control, but optimize,…

Amazon Confirms Plans for Store Under New Grocery Brand

Amazon.com Inc. plans to launch a new supermarket brand distinct from the Whole Foods Market chain the company acquired two years ago, a sign of the retail giant’s hunger for a slice of the grocery market beyond high-end organic food. The company has posted four job listings for “Amazon’s first grocery store” in the Woodland Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles. An Amazon spokeswoman confirmed the listings, and said the store would open in 2020. The brand will be distinct from Whole Foods and w…

Bold Investors Like Goldman See Opportunities In Data Centres

For traditional real estate investors, getting involved in the data centre sector can be hard. But investors looking to back and build companies can find ways into a sector where occupational growth is set to continue to rise. That was the view of panellists at Bisnow’s first London Data Centre Investment Conference & Expo, hosted by Sungard Availability Services.