Venturon Ltd.

Venturon Sustainable Proptech Fund 1, L.P. (the “Fund” or “Fund 1”) is a  venture capital firm, investing in digital real estate, property technology and sustainable proptech. We focus on companies who are well positioned to prioritize and accelerate the sustainability transformation occurring within our built environment. Venturon was founded by Deena Pantalone in 2016.  Joanna Creed is the Director of Operations and General Counsel. Since its inception Venturon has invested in seed stage proptech companies throughout the United States and Canada. 
 

The Fund has the following characteristics:

We are extremely excited about the prospects within the industry and are seeing a lot of confidence and appetite seep back into the industry, especially in the sustainability space.  Since last year, PropTech has shown significant maturation, even despite the difficult macroeconomic environment. During this time, we have also seen an unwavering institutional commitment to ESG and sustainability within real estate, despite the choppier broader climate.
 
A few key statistics highlighting the growth within PropTech over the past year.

We will look at emerging areas in the decarbonization, waste reduction and energy efficiency landscape as it touches the built environment, which broadly can include anything from a single-family home to an infrastructure project. It is our view that these areas will face significant tails winds in the coming months and years given the significant government programs that are pushing towards a net zero future. By way of example, the Inflation Reduction Act¸ in the US, the Carbon Tax in Canada, among others, will drive the adoption of sustainable technology as well as help drive unit economics in such a way to ensure a positive cost benefit analysis. 

We are at the forefront of widespread climate crisis which will result in the greatest wealth creation opportunity of our lifetime, focused on decarbonization and waste reduction. It is common knowledge these days that climate change is real and could be catastrophic. Thankfully, the world is finally waking up to the risks and realities of climate change. As noted above, we are focused on the intersection of climate tech and proptech which we have termed “Sustainable Proptech”.  We have divided Sustainable Proptech into 4 verticals: Sustainable Construction, Research & Analytics, Asset Management and Smart Cities (which are further described below (categorization examples are a representative sample and are not exhaustive).

 

Why are we focusing on the above sectors? Firstly, we have substantial domain expertise that gives us a competitive advantage over others in the market. Secondly, the market is rife with opportunity. Countries and corporations are taking action to mitigate significant damage from climate change. Opportunities abound for companies to help deliver on climate goals. Entrepreneurs are diving in, with many new entrants in the space. The Sustainable Proptech Report shows that new entrants in the space have doubled relative to the prior decade. This has come with a matched increase in venture investment (increasing 80% between 2020 and 2021, reaching $56B in the United States.) We recognize that timelines for companies to scale are typically longer, talent is in short supply, infrastructure is lagging and inflation and supply-chain pressures are increasing the cost of operations. That being said, climate tech has matured significantly since the “cleantech 1.0” boom. Today the unit economics of many of these technologies have brough them in line with costs of legacy tech and allowed them to scale (eg. battery, wind and solar energy technologies). The advancement of these renewable energy technologies has laid the foundation for many climate tech innovations that require significant energy usage — a good example being retrofitting existing building stock and EV transportation. Climate tech is currently at an inflection point. Nearly all climate-related technologies existing today are positioned to achieve scale in the next 10 years.

 

The opportunity in this market is driven by three factors:

 

 

The above factors are driving market adoption for sustainable proptech products and services. This is being enhanced by industry tailwinds through tax incentives, grants and subsidies from, among other things, the Inflation Reduction Act (US) and the Emissions Reduction Plan (Canada). There are trillions of dollars of dry powder ready to enter the climate/impact/ESG space in the coming years. Large pools of capital are notoriously hard to deploy and as there’s no plausible way to distribute trillions in early-stage startups. As a result, it is inevitably going to trickle to the later stages. So why are we focusing on seed stage companies in the Sustainable Proptech space? Because our strength is finding and helping the greatest founders solving the biggest problems with funding, strategy and support. We dream big, we don’t believe in half measures and we are genuine and fair partners. We use our experience to find the very best teams to invest in and then we enhance those teams with even more senior expertise, horsepower and connections in order to scale faster. As a result, when those companies survive and thrive through the early stage (3 to 5 year period) they’ll have access to virtually unlimited capital to grow, scale and change the world.