Sumeru Equity Partners (SEP) – along with existing investors and company management – has made a USD65 million strategic investment in SaaS property management platform Buildum.
SEP Managing Directors, Jason Babcoke and John Brennan, will join Buildium’s board of directors.
“Buildium has successfully made the transition from start up to established market leader, and its large and rapidly growing base of happy customers is a testament to the company’s customer-first philosophy,” says Jason Babcoke, managing director at SEP. “Founder-led teams with strong product backgrounds are attractive investments for us – especially since Buildium was founded in the practice of property management and truly understands the pain points of the market first-hand. This combination leads to successful product companies – as evidenced by Buildium’s clear leadership in this space.”
An Urban Institute study suggests that 59 percent of new household formations over the next 15 years will be renters. This will have a significant impact on real estate professionals, who will be increasingly inundated with even more day-to-day tasks. Buildium is uniquely suited to address these challenges by automating the entire lifecycle of property management within a single platform.
Through the platform, real estate professionals streamline time-consuming tasks such as rent/fee collection, tenant screening, maintenance requests, and vacancy advertising – so they can focus on higher-value tasks that help grow their business. In addition, the software helps these companies respond to requests of increasingly-digital tenants and association owners, who want to make payments online and communicate electronically with property managers. Buildium’s software is intuitive, comprehensive, and purposefully designed to suit the unique needs of property managers, owners, and tenants. Through its 2015 acquisition of All Property Management – a leading online marketing service for property managers – Buildium is also the only company that gives property managers modern tools to acquire new customers and grow revenue.
“Since our inception, we have always been a customer-centric organisation,” says Michael Monteiro, co-founder and CEO of Buildium. “We found SEP’s focus on product and go-to-market positioned them as an ideal partner for Buildium as we launch our next phase of growth. With their financial backing we will increase investment to continue delivering a thoughtfully designed, complete, and easy-to-use property management platform that meets our customers’ needs with industry leading customer care.”
