Existing backer (KIP) led the financing, which is described as a bridge round. (KBIC) also participated. The raise brings Santa Fe Springs, California-based Xpanner’s total funding to $38 million since its 2020 inception.

Xpanner turns construction equipment that customers already own into automated assets “without replacing a single machine,” according to , the company’s co-founder and CEO.��

“There’s no upfront investment, no rip-and-replace,” Lee added. “Like a smartphone gaining new capabilities through app updates, customers expand their automation through simple software updates.”

The benefits for its customers include significant cost savings and shorter project durations, according to Lee.

Originally founded in South Korea, Xpanner moved its headquarters to the U.S. in 2023. Today, , , and are among its customers.��

Notably, all of Xpanner’s co-founders have deep industry experience. Lee spent two decades in executive positions at and , driving unmanned construction projects and corporate venture initiatives in the heavy equipment world. CFO spent over 12 years working in heavy equipment at Bobcat, followed by eight years in venture capital at Korea’s largest commercial bank. CTO led robotics and automation at for 20 years, becoming the first in the industry to commercialize semi-automation features for construction machinery.

Growth and a path to profitability

Xpanner is refreshingly transparent about its financials. The company grew revenue from $3 million in 2023 to $7 million in 2024 to $21 million in 2025, according to Park. It saw $8 million in revenue and $1 million in EBIT (earnings before interest and taxes) in the first quarter of 2026.

The startup is targeting $60 million in ARR by year’s end.

Impressively, the company says it maintains a gross margin above 80%, thanks mostly to its subscription-based AaaS model. It achieved monthly break-even in 2025, and Park said Xpanner is on track for full-year profitability this year.

“Once hardware is deployed, incremental subscription and service revenue flows at near-zero marginal cost,” he said.��

The company plans to use its new capital in part to strengthen its development capabilities by advancing its next-generation physical AI hardware and software platform, deepening its core component engineering, and expanding its data and AI infrastructure.��

Some of its customers are still on a perpetual modular model, which includes the one-time purchase of its X1 Kit hardware paired with its software. Looking ahead, Xpanner expects to be fully on its subscription model by the end of the year.��

The company is also actively expanding into adjacent verticals, including battery energy storage systems (BESS) and AI data center construction.

‘Strong gross margins, near-zero churn’

, managing director at KIP, told Crunchbase News via email that his firm was impressed by Xpanner’s commercial traction and unit economics.

“Strong gross margins, near-zero churn, and rapid account expansion are signals that the value proposition is real and not pilot-driven,” he said.

director at KBIC, believes that most construction automation companies hit a scalability wall because they automate entire machines end-to-end. However, he said that since Xpanner’s task-specific approach scales through software rather than hardware redesign, the company “can expand wallet share inside accounts without proportional cost.”

“That’s a software-economics business operating in a hardware-dominated market, and it’s rare,” he wrote via e-mail.

Physical AI funding smashes records

Xpanner sits at the intersection of two sectors that have received strong interest from investors in recent years.

Startups working on physical AI — real-world applications of artificial intelligence, including technologies such as automated hardware and robotics — have already hauled in more than $37 billion in venture funding globally this year, , shattering the full-year record of $21 billion set in both 2025 and 2021.

At the same time, venture investment in real estate and property-related startups rebounded last year, largely driven by funding to AI-centric companies.

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U.S. and Canadian companies secured a staggering $252.6 billion in seed- through growth-stage funding rounds per Crunchbase data. That’s more than 3x the total raised in the prior quarter, and the largest quarterly total of all time.

Predictably, artificial intelligence was the driver. More than 87% of Q1 investment went to companies in Crunchbase AI-related categories.

To say these are record funding tallies is somewhat of an understatement. It’s more like Q1 smashed the prior quarterly record — $95.7 billion — set in Q3 2021.

Just a single financing for was bigger than the prior quarterly record for all startup funding rounds put together. And the four next-largest financings totaled almost as much as the prior quarter, which at the time we considered a very strong period for startup funding.

So, in summary, it was a lot of money. For a more detailed picture, we drill down more deeply into how that largesse was distributed across stages and sectors. We also take a look at exits for the quarter, including both IPOs and acquisitions.

Table of contents

• AI
• Later stage and technology growth
• Early stage
• Seed
• Exits
• Big picture: A paradigm shift
• Methodology
• Glossary of funding terms

AI

We’ll start with AI, since that’s where the overwhelming majority of the money went.

A staggering $221 billion went to North American companies in Crunchbase AI-related categories in the first quarter. That’s about 6x the AI investment total from the prior quarter, which was itself no slacker on this front.

For perspective, we charted out AI-related funding over the past 13 quarters to compare.

A few megarounds for high-profile companies accounted for most of the quarter’s AI funding, led by OpenAI, , and .

Later stage and technology growth

These same names factor heavily in tallies for late-stage and technology-growth funding, which comprised the vast majority of total startup investment.

Per Crunchbase data, $222.4 billion — or 88% of all North America startup investment — went to rounds at these stages. That’s more than 5x the prior quarter’s tally, and more than triple year-ago levels.

The gains were driven by bigger deals, not more of them. Later- and growth-stage round counts were actually down a smidge sequentially in Q1. For perspective, below we chart round counts and investment totals at this stage for the past five quarters.

Enormous rounds for AI companies accounted for a majority of the late- and growth-stage totals. The biggest of these was OpenAI’s record-setting $110 billion February financing led by , and . The generative AI giant topped it off with a raise in March.

Anthropic secured the quarter’s next-biggest late-stage financing — a $30 billion February Series G — followed by xAI, which announced a $20 billion Series E in January. landed another of the quarter’s very big deals, with a $16 billion February Series D.

Early stage

Early-stage investment was also running high in Q1, albeit not setting records.

Overall, investors put $25.1 billion into deals around Series A and Series B stage in the first quarter. That’s up 17% from the prior quarter and 56% from year-ago levels. It’s also the highest quarterly total in over three years, though still below peaks scaled in 2021.

Early-stage round counts, meanwhile, were down a bit, indicating investors’ increasingly concentrating their bets among perceived star performers.

As usual, a few jumbo-sized deals significantly boosted the early-stage totals. For Q1, this included four rounds of $500 million or more.

Of these, Austin-based humanoid robotics startup was the biggest fundraiser, pulling in $520 million in a February Series A. Three other companies secured $500 million financings: AI infrastructure developer , semiconductor startup , and industrial robotics-focused .

Seed

Seed-stage investment, meanwhile, did not show an upswing but remained at historically robust levels.

Per Crunchbase data, an estimated $5.1 billion went to seed and pre-seed investments in Q1. That’s roughly flat with the prior quarter and up a bit from year-ago levels.

Seed round counts declined in Q1, both sequentially and year over year. However, we expect these tallies to rise some over time, along with investment totals, as seed deals commonly get added to the data set weeks after they close.

Exits

Exit activity was fairly staid in comparison to the high-rolling startup fundraising environment.

That said, the IPO market did boast a few sizable startup debuts. Of these, the largest was the January IPO of construction equipment rental marketplace , followed by space tech company , and crypto platform .

Below, we aggregated a list of 12 private, venture-backed companies that carried out IPOs on U.S. exchanges.

Acquirers also announced several large deals to purchase venture-backed private companies.

The priciest planned M&A deal was ’s agreement to purchase business credit card provider for $5.15 billion. Biotech also delivered some large outcomes, including ’s planned acquisition of RNA therapeutics startup , and ’ purchase of allergy treatment startup .

Below, we put together a list of five of the quarter’s biggest M&A deals.1

Big picture: A paradigm shift

Having written many of these funding reports over the years, it’s common for one quarter to quietly blur into another. Not so for Q1 of 2026.

The just-ended quarter cemented a notion that startup insiders have been circling for some time: Private markets now have the capital stores and appetite for ultra-high valuations to rival public markets. For evidence, look no further than OpenAI’s $122 billion raise at a valuation higher than all but a handful of the largest large-cap technology companies.

IPO enthusiasts may pine for a future period when these most sought-after foundational AI names finally do make it to public markets. But for now, they’ve demonstrated there are plenty of investors willing to shell out billions in private offerings as well.

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Methodology

The data contained in this report comes directly from Crunchbase, and is based on reported data. Data is as of March 31, 2026.

Note that data lags are most pronounced at the earliest stages of venture activity, with seed funding amounts increasing significantly after the end of a quarter/year.

Please note that all funding values are given in U.S. dollars unless otherwise noted. Crunchbase converts foreign currencies to U.S. dollars at the prevailing spot rate from the date funding rounds, acquisitions, IPOs and other financial events are reported. Even if those events were added to Crunchbase long after the event was announced, foreign currency transactions are converted at the historic spot price.

Glossary of funding terms

Seed and angel consists of seed, pre-seed and angel rounds. Crunchbase also includes venture rounds of unknown series, equity crowdfunding and convertible notes at $3 million (USD or as-converted USD equivalent) or less.

Early-stage consists of Series A and Series B rounds, as well as other round types. Crunchbase includes venture rounds of unknown series, corporate venture and other rounds above $3 million, and those less than or equal to $15 million.

Late-stage consists of Series C, Series D, Series E and later-lettered venture rounds following the “Series [Letter]” naming convention. Also included are venture rounds of unknown series, corporate venture and other rounds above $15 million. Corporate rounds are only included if a company has raised an equity funding at seed through a venture series funding round.

Technology growth is a private-equity round raised by a company that has previously raised a “venture” round. (So basically, any round from the previously defined stages.)

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led the financing for the New York-based company. , , and also participated in the round.

Founded in October 2024, Rebar says it uses artificial intelligence to help commercial HVAC suppliers generate quotes on average 60% to 70% faster than traditional methods. Its proprietary computer vision models analyze construction blueprints and identify, categorize and count all HVAC equipment to produce a bill of materials and generate a quote, according to the company.

Rebar’s focus on the HVAC industry is intentional.

“Most companies either concentrate on other trades or try to cover all of them at once, which ultimately means they serve none particularly well,” CEO and co-founder told Crunchbase News. “Rebar takes the opposite approach. Our AI is trained on millions of HVAC blueprints and mirrors the workflows real estimators use when building a quote.”

Rebar doubled its annual recurring revenue in the first six weeks of 2026, according to Brown, thanks to dozens of new customers using the platform. It operates on a usage-based subscription model.

“If you’re able to increase your volume and build more proposals, the opportunity to win projects goes higher,” Brown explained. “On average, the companies that are using us [would] win around 5% to 10% of the proposals that they created, and those proposals could take up to a week to create before using Rebar.”

He noted that, while it’s still early and construction contracts often take years to finalize, initial conversations with customers suggest win rates may be increasing by roughly 2x to 3x using the new tool.

That same process can take minutes, according to Brown.

Today, Rebar has 40 clients, and notably, seven of them are investors in the startup.

While Rebar’s first product is AI quoting for HVAC suppliers, Brown said the startup plans to expand its product capabilities to plumbing and electrical equipment suppliers through additional agents.

Firsthand industry perspective

Brown’s interest in the HVAC industry stems from summers working with his uncle, the owner of a large HVAC commercial distributor. He then ended up working as an estimator and sales engineer at /, where he partnered with contractors, engineers and manufacturers to design, sell and support customized HVAC systems.

“I spent over five years in the space focused on designing and selling HVAC equipment and doing the manual process that we’re solving at Rebar many times,” he recalled. “I’ve looked and built inventory lists off of a plan set by printing out blueprints, highlighters and rulers. I’ve used PDF editors. I’ve really used everything, and I never thought I would end up in tech, nor start a tech company.”

When that company was acquired and became part of , Brown had the opportunity to explore the application of AI in day-to-day operations.

Eventually, he decided to branch out and founded Rebar along with .

What investors are looking for

, a partner on Prudence’s investment team, told Crunchbase News that Brown’s education in mechanical engineering combined with his experience working in the HVAC industry give him a “unique,” firsthand perspective.

Prudence is always looking for companies that leverage unique technology to automate historically manual processes, according to Viniar, often in industries where needs have never been addressed by purpose-built software.

“Rebar fits the bill perfectly — HVAC, plumbing, and electrical are large but historically overlooked industries with dozens of manual workflows, none of which could be automated without AI,” he wrote via email. “For the first time, Rebar is delivering tools to their customers that, in many cases, are compressing the time to complete manual tasks by over 90%, leading to greater efficiency, lower costs, and more revenue.”

Venture investment in real estate-related startups has rebounded in recent years after plunging from the pandemic peak. In 2025, startups in the sector pulled in approximately $10.5 billion in seed- through growth-stage financing globally, per Crunchbase . That’s up about 17% from $9 billion in 2024, with much of the recent investment going to startups that promise greater ROI through the use of automation or AI.

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Nonetheless, the first couple months of the year have brought a steady stream of market entries from companies in sectors such as construction tech, space tech and biotech. Noticeably absent, however, are new offerings from SaaS companies, long an IPO market staple.

Per Crunchbase data, 11 venture- or seed-backed U.S. companies went public on major exchanges so far this year, raising just over $3 billion. Comparatively, that’s a fairly robust showing for the first couple months of the year, which tends to be a reasonably active period for IPOs.

Looking at recent years charted below, the first couple months of 2026 are well above the bottom ranks, but still far below the 2021 market peak for volume of offerings and total raised.

Leading offerings weren’t your typical VC-backed deals

The lineup of companies going public so far this year, however, includes many that don’t look like your typical VC-backed offering.

This includes the year’s largest VC-funded IPO: , a service that provides construction equipment rentals and support for building projects. The 11-year-old, Columbia, Missouri-based company raised more than $700 million in its January offering and had a recent market cap of over $7 billion.

The second-largest debut was also somewhat of an outlier: space tech company , which is majority-owned by private equity firm . It’s down from its initial trading price but recently valued around $3.4 billion.

Per Crunchbase data, there have been six IPOs of venture-backed companies this year that raised $200 million or more, which we list below.

SaaS squashed

It’s also noteworthy who isn’t on the list. For years, enterprise software companies have been among the more reliable IPO market entrants. This year, however, they’ve been notably absent as the sector contends with an extended selloff fueled partly by concerns of AI-abetted disruption.

We’re also not seeing SaaS companies in the immediate IPO pipeline. A perusal of so far this year showed no venture-backed SaaS unicorns that submitted a new IPO filing in 2026.

It’s a sharp contrast to just a few months ago. One of last year’s splashiest IPOs — design software platform — is now down more than two-thirds from its peak. Another of the more recent big SaaS offerings — business travel and expense platform — has shed more than half its value.

Meanwhile, -backed , which provides tools for marketers and app developers, withdrew its planned IPO this month, amid the software route. It’s likely a delay, as that Liftoff filed a new confidential plan shortly afterward.

IPO market in an odd place

Overall, the IPO market is in an odd place at the moment. It’s an unfriendly scene for companies with business models viewed as vulnerable to AI-driven displacement. At the same time, there’s still continued buzz around the potential for record-setting offerings from , and .

Of those, the one rumored to be closest on the horizon is SpaceX, newly combined with at a reported $1.25 trillion valuation. The company is said to be eyeing a market debut as early as this summer.

If that happens, and the current SaaS squeeze continues, it wouldn’t be surprising to see a pattern of record-setting IPO returns coinciding with a very small number of actual debuts.

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With the latest Series B raise, Austin-based Ownwell says it has now raised $54 million in total equity funding since its 2020 inception. and co-led its latest round, which included participation from , , , , and . provided the $20 million in debt financing.

CEO said he and CTO started Ownwell to “democratize access to the tools and resources real estate experts use to build wealth and financial freedom.”

As a former asset manager, Pace said he worked for some of the wealthiest families and individuals in the world on the investment management side.

“I saw firsthand how billionaires manage their 28 homes and their apartment complexes and their retail across the country, and how everything is perfectly optimized,” he told Crunchbase News in an interview. “And so we built software for the purpose of providing tools for everyone, regardless of the value of their asset.”

Ownwell launched for customers in 2021, initially handling the property-tax appeal process. Pace said its tech automates “complex steps and analyzes millions of local records” to surface the strongest case to present to local municipalities to argue for a lower home assessment and, in turn, a lower property tax bill.

“We market to people that are typically very underserved,” Pace said. “That law firm down the street doesn’t want to help a $200,000 home [owner] appeal their property taxes. They want the skyscraper.”

Pace claims that Ownwell is the only multistate company of its kind. It currently operates with local tax consultants in about a dozen states: Texas, New York, Florida, California, Illinois, Georgia, Washington, Maryland, Colorado, Arizona, Pennsylvania and Michigan. Part of the newly raised capital will go toward expanding to other markets, and “going deeper” into existing markets, he said.

A million appeals

Ownwell doesn’t charge customers unless it lowers their tax bill. Depending on the market, its contingency fee is 25% to 35% of the savings it earns for property owners. (The fee depends on its cost to operate in that market.)

“The majority of homeowners do not appeal or even think to appeal, so bringing consistent awareness to this for the average homeowner is the biggest challenge,” Pace said.

Recently, the company surpassed more than 1 million appeals processed, and says it has saved its customers over $400 million in property taxes.

Over the years, Ownwell has expanded its offering to include helping people get property exemptions, compare insurance providers and explore refinancing options. The company is also integrated with , and has partnerships with and . Ownwell gets commissions from carriers or lenders that it refers homeowners to, similar to ’s model, Pace said.

The startup also markets a nationwide property tax packet to help people outside of the 12 states in which it is operating to file their own appeals.

“We’re taking the internal data that we’ve collected over the past six years and over hundreds of thousands of appeals across the country, and figuring out what wins,” Pace told Crunchbase News. “We’re prompting AI tooling with all this proprietary data that we have to give customers a useful packet that basically is the ultimate ‘how to appeal’ in markets that we are not in yet.”

Ownwell has over 500,000 customers, including residential and commercial property owners throughout the country, in addition to homeowners. Since inception, Ownwell has maintained an annual growth rate of over 100% every year, according to Pace. In 2025, it grew customers by over 180%. Pace said the company is currently profitable (both cash flow and net income positive) but “is prioritizing growth.”

A ‘customer-obsessed experience in a much larger market’

In 2025, global real estate-related startups pulled in about $10.5 billion in seed- through growth-stage financing, per Crunchbase . That’s up about 17% from $9 billion in 2024.

For its part, Ownwell is not sharing its current valuation, with Pace saying only that it “has grown significantly from round to round.” Presently, it has 108 employees.

, managing partner at Left Lane Capital, which led Ownwell’s Series A round, notes that he served on Truebill’s board during its $1.5 billion acquisition by . “I’ve seen firsthand that helping consumers save money never goes out of style,” he wrote via email.

Ownwell, in Pujji’s view, has built a “customer-obsessed experience in a much larger market.”

“With a tech-enabled agentic product built for complex, local markets, “the team has achieved something you rarely see: tripling customers served annually at scale.”

In a blog post, Intuit Ventures said it was impressed with Pace’s vision “to help millions of homeowners and save money for the consumers who need it most.”

The firm added: “We’re proud to support the Ownwell team as they continue to deliver a product that creates holistic, money-saving experiences for consumers.”

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led the financing, which included participation from ��and angel investors from , ��and , among others. Founded in 2022 by former institutional commercial real estate operators and , Cambio has now raised a total of $22 million. It participated in Y Combinator’s summer 2022 cohort and then went into “R&D mode.”

The San Francisco-based company launched its offering at the end of 2023, and de Guzman claims it has since seen “rapid adoption” across enterprise customers and geographies — scaling to 35 countries and to more than 2 billion square feet in assets. It recently opened a London office to support EU and APAC growth.��

From ‘messy’ to investment-grade data

Put simply, Cambio uses large language models and agentic artificial intelligence workflows to turn “messy building data into investor-grade decisions and reporting.” And it claims to do so within minutes.

“Commercial real estate owners sit on thousands of pages of unstructured documents — spreadsheets, PDFs, invoices, energy audits, regulatory filings — that historically required months of manual analysis,” de Guzman told Crunchbase News. “Cambio applies large language models and agentic AI to ingest, reason over, and synthesize that data automatically, delivering investment-grade capital and compliance decisions in minutes.”

Cambio, she said, is architected around agentic AI software that can reason across unstructured data, run multi-step analyses, and “continuously adapt as regulations, assets, and market conditions change.”

In a nutshell, it aims to help institutional investors figure out where to deploy capital, which assets to prioritize, and how to maximize returns. Customers include , , , ��and , among others.

The market opportunity, according to de Guzman, is enormous: commercial real estate is estimated to be in the U.S. alone.

In 2025, global real estate-related startups pulled in about $10.5 billion in seed- through growth-stage financing, per Crunchbase . That’s up about 17% from $9 billion in 2024.

An industry track record

Part of Cambio’s strategy is to have built a (largely female) leadership team that has directly worked in the space it is trying to serve. De Guzman and Grayson began their careers at large institutional firms such as and Oxford Properties.��

The startup also recently hired alumna to serve as head of product innovation. , formerly of Oxford Properties and , has been tapped to serve as lead of Cambio’s European and APAC business.

The moves from institutions to a startup serving them reflect a broader shift happening in commercial real estate, noted Grayson — the choice “to step inside AI transformation, and not just observe it from the sidelines.”

Cambio operates an enterprise SaaS revenue model. It plans to use its new capital primarily to scale product and engineering.

, managing director at Maverick Ventures, told Crunchbase News via email that his firm was impressed with the fact that Cambio’s founders had spent more than two decades running commercial real estate portfolios.

“That lived experience matters,” he said. “It gave them an intuitive understanding that this wasn’t a tooling problem – it was a workflow problem.”

Maverick was also impressed by the fact that Cambio wasn’t trying “to bolt AI onto existing processes.”

‘Re-architecting the workflow’

“Cambio isn’t automating around the edges, it’s re-architecting the workflow end to end in an AI-native way, with a deeply product-minded approach,” Isono said. “Knowing what to build, which workflow to wedge into, and how to sequence products requires having lived these workflows, which Leia and Steph have.”

The investor also praised the startup’s technical team, noting that CTO was one of the earliest backend engineers at , a marketplace and wholesale platform that was valued at nearly $13 billion in 2022. That technical team, he said, also includes Ph.D.s with “deep expertise” in building science.��

“That matters because commercial real estate is fundamentally tied to the physical world. Much of the data isn’t clean or fully digitized, and automating it is meaningfully harder than in purely digital domains,” Isono said. “Solving that unlocks a uniquely valuable dataset that compounds over time.”

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CEO founded the Austin, Texas-based company after meeting luxury real estate agent , who claims to have helped facilitate $9 billion in sales over the course of her decades-long career.��

Kramer said he was so struck by Mills’ “burden of outdated tools” that he set out to build Luxury Presence, which he describes as “a growth platform that drives how high-end agents, teams, and brokerages generate, nurture, and uncover new and repeat business.”

The platform helps agents build premium, branded websites and provides them with advanced marketing tools. The startup is now gearing up for the February release of a new product called Presence CRM, which Kramer describes as an AI-powered relationship engine that aims to find “hidden deals” in real estate agents’ networks.��

Luxury Presence’s client base has more than 17,000 real estate businesses, comprising more than 87,000 real estate agents. The company projects ARR growth of 40% for 2025, and is nearly profitable, according to Kramer.��

Its Series C financing also included participation from , and , as well as Mills and her husband, Adam Mills. In addition to the equity raise, Luxury Presence also closed on a $15 million debt facility from .��

With the new round, Luxury Presence has raised a total of $74 million in equity since its 2016 inception. co-founder is also an investor. The company declined to reveal valuation, saying only that its latest financing was a “significant’ up round compared to its in August 2023.

The raise comes at a time when venture funding flowing to real estate tech startups is rebounding slightly compared to years past. In 2025, global real estate-related startups pulled in about $10.4 billion in seed- through growth-stage financing, per Crunchbase — down 55.7% from 2019, the second-highest year on record after the 2021 venture funding spike but up slightly from the $9 billion raised in 2024.

Unified platform

AI is not a new feature for Luxury Presence. The company about two years ago launched a product called Presence CoPilot, which helps agents with client service-related tasks like taking notes when they are leaving a listing appointment. And last year, it came out with a product aimed at real estate marketing consisting of a “fully autonomous team” of AI agents to help with things like SEO blogging as well as managing paid ads and budgets.

Kramer is particularly excited about the company’s new Presence Platform, which he says is built on a data and intelligence layer that aims to capture the full behavioral picture of an agent’s network.

“We help agents market themselves and their properties, and we help them get more opportunities out of the existing network,” he told Crunchbase News in an interview. “And the new CRM helps them uncover opportunities within their existing sphere that they otherwise would not know about.”��

The company also incorporates third-party data such as property records, life events, and shifts in estimated net worth. Overall, its offering analyzes hundreds of millions of behavioral signals, predicts who is likely to enter the market, and drafts outreach in the agent’s own brand voice

“With this combined intelligence, our CRM can predict who is likely to enter the real estate market before they show any visible intent, which then tells the agent exactly who to contact, when, and with what message,” Kramer claims.

Kramer believes that Luxury Presence’s advantage over competitors such as , and is that it unifies a number of functions that otherwise run on “fragmented systems that rely on agents to manually input data, orchestrate follow-up, and run their own marketing.”

The result, Kramer says, is that agents using Luxury Presence grow faster and close more annual transaction volume than peers in the same market.

For its part, Luxury Presence operates a SaaS subscription revenue model, offering plans for agents, teams, and brokerages spanning in size from solo agents to large enterprises. It also now has a usage component, based on where its AI is having conversations with leads on the agent’s behalf.

Repeat investor

, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, notes that this round marks the third time that his firm has invested in Luxury Presence, a fact that “speaks to the conviction” the firm has in the startup’s “team, product and size of the opportunity.”

“From the beginning, we believed Luxury Presence was uniquely positioned to reinvent one of the world’s oldest and largest industries,” he wrote via email. “We’ve been fortunate to work with many of the leading vertical AI and SaaS companies of the last decade — including in ecommerce, in construction, in restaurants, and in field services — and we believe Luxury Presence has the same potential in real estate.”

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But now in 2025, as rates have started to somewhat, venture dollars raised by real estate tech, or proptech, startups are inching upwards slightly compared to recent years. Capital is largely going to companies that either sit inside core workflows around payments, closings and procurement, or deliver explicit ROI via automation and artificial intelligence. But tech-enabled homebuilders are getting a piece of the pie, too.

The broad trend: Even before the pandemic-fueled funding peaks, proptech startups received more than double the amount of venture funding in 2019 than they have in more recent years. While investors haven’t given up on proptech, funding to startups in the space is only slightly higher in 2025, and deal count is at a multiyear record low.

Notably, private equity firms have been involved in three of the five largest deals in 2025.

The numbers: So far in 2025, global real estate-related startups have pulled in about $10.2 billion in seed- through growth-stage financing, per Crunchbase — down 57% from 2019, the second-highest year on record after the 2021 venture funding spike. Deal count is down 58.3% in 2025 compared to the high of 2,722 in 2021, the peak of the funding craze. The lower deal count signals both potentially decreased investor interest in the space, as well as larger round sizes.

Noteworthy recent rounds

Several large megadeals have taken place in 2025, many of them in the second half of the year. Unsurprisingly, AI surfaces in more than one deal.

Just this month, Santa Clara, California-based tech-enabled homebuilder raised $400 million in new financing — $300 million in real estate capital (for the purchase of lots) and $100 million for its operating company. CEO and co-founder told that the company’s goal is to be “the Amazon of homes.”

In its core markets, Homebound claims it is now building homes about 40% faster than its direct competitors, with build costs around 25% lower. It uses a proprietary AI platform that manages millions of data points across more than 1,000 distinct tasks required to deliver a home, from lot acquisition through move-in.

The company says it has grown its topline by more than 4x since 2021, and margin dollars by more than 6x, and is on track to be profitable in 2026.

The startup has raised nearly $530 million in capital since its 2018 inception. Investors include , , , , and , among others.

In July, New York-based , whose platform aims to allow consumers to earn rewards on rent and daily neighborhood spend, raised $250 million at a $13 billion valuation in a round co-led by and real estate company . Impressively, that’s up from a valuation of $3.1 billion in January 2024.

The company has raised over $800 million since it was founded in 2021, per Crunchbase . Other backers include , , and .

And in August, netted a $250 million Series E financing at a $2.25 billion valuation. led that round, which also included participation from , and . ElisaAI is focused on automating healthcare and housing systems.

The New York-based company has raised nearly $392 million since its 2017 inception, per Crunchbase . Its products include AI-guided tours, lease audits and a maintenance App designed to lower costs and improve tenant experiences, according to a by .

, former executive and current president of digital home finance startup , told Crunchbase News that he believes proptech is “on the precipice of a massive transformation in the next year or two.”

“The benefits of that transformation will accrue to the consumer,” he added. “AI applications will re-make the way we discover, buy, finance, and manage our homes, and there’s suddenly a new opportunity for a next generation of leaders to rise to the top of the proptech industry.”

Other notable raises

There were also a number of other interesting raises in the space over the course of the year that didn’t fall under the megadeal category. Many of their business models revolved on automating tasks as well as giving investors and homebuyers more options when it comes to purchasing or investing in homes.

• In November, -backed , a Seattle-based fractional real estate investing platform, announced $27 million in new funding alongside the launch of a marketplace that it says gives investors a way to buy and sell shares of individual rental homes across the U.S. “with just a few clicks.”
• , a New York-based mortgage tech startup powered by agentic AI, landed $22 million in Series A funding. (Interestingly, digital wealth management platform , which just went public, also entered the mortgage tech space.)
• , an AI-powered real estate platform based in Deleware that claims to help homeowners sell their homes without “costly” commission fees, announced a $6.4 million seed round led by .

While there was a small rebound in 2025, it’s difficult to get too excited yet about the real estate technology funding outlook. Many of the biggest rounds were a mix of private equity and later-stage financings. Unless interest rates get meaningfully lower, we should probably expect more of the same in 2026.

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That was one core finding from our latest analysis around funding for companies developing tools for employers and jobseekers.

A deeper dive into the numbers shows startups targeting frontline workers in industries such as healthcare, construction and retail comprised one of the larger investment themes. This translates into both deal flow and big checks. To illustrate, we used Crunchbase to put together a list of 14 recently funded��1 companies in this area.

Healthcare in the lead

Investment recipients include a mix of industry-specific and more general purpose offerings. But among sector-focused startups, healthcare stood as a favored area.

This makes sense given the sector’s longstanding status as a growth industry. Even amid the rather bleak U.S. August , healthcare was one of the few areas that saw measurable gains. It seems the is not going away.

Two of the largest funding recipients on our list — and — are tackling this predominantly in-person profession with different aims. McLean, Virginia-based ShiftMed has raised over $315 million to date for a platform helping employers bring local per diem nurses on board and tackle understaffing with AI-enabled scheduling tools.

New York-based Nomad Health, on the other hand, offers a platform for travel nurses to find jobs. The decade-old company has raised over $240 million in funding to date.

Construction, industrial and customer-facing businesses

Developers of employer tools for other industries are also generating enthusiasm with investors.

In the construction space, for instance, San Francisco-based is looking to build up its user base with $23 million in Series A funding this spring led by and . The 4-year-old company offers a single platform for contractors to manage payroll, HR, expenses and field operations.

In some ways, the startup fits in the category that Bessemer partner , who led the firm’s investment in Miter, calls “business in a box” companies. These are essentially platforms that business owners can use to handle administrative tasks and free up time to concentrate on their core offerings.

“So much of that is language-based work,” Bennett said, regarding the peripheral demands of running a business, and so can see remarkable efficiency gains with the rise of AI-enabled language models.

Several others have raised rounds for tools targeting the manufacturing space, including San Francisco-based and Paris-based . In the hospitality industry, meanwhile, Paris-based raised a fresh fund this spring for a platform targeting hospitality industry employers.

Where the jobs are

For frontline work-related startups, it helps that this category encompasses most jobs. While remote work may seem widespread, nearly three-fourths of employed Americans still on a typical workday. Typically, frontline jobs are either difficult, impractical or flat-out impossible to carry out remotely.

Moreover, these are commonly sectors like healthcare, building and home services, that have shown to be more resilient of late, even amid a weakening job market. For employers, there’s apparently considerable appeal in tools that automate some of the drudgework and administrative work, to focus on their primary mission.

And for investors there’s also potential for some good returns. The most recent big exit offering validation for this thesis is , the software platform for home services providers that went public in December. Shares got a boost last week following a strong earnings report, pushing its market cap to around $11 billion. Seems you can do alright on public markets, too, as a software company focused on the frontline workforce.

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— the company that made its name marketing low-priced tiny homes that ship flat and quickly unfold — is a prime example.

Founded in 2017 by father and son and , the North Las Vegas company attracted huge publicity with the introduction of its first modular home, the Casita. This roughly 360-square-foot structure, equipped with a kitchen and bathroom, and initially advertised for $50,000, attracted a within a couple years.

It did not result in scores of customers going on to own casitas. However, plenty of fans did invest in the company, thanks to a series of heavily marketed crowdfunding campaigns. To date, Boxabl says it has raised over $230 million from over 50,000 investors.

But the plan wasn’t to stay private forever. Earlier this month, Boxabl a deal to go public on through a merger with publicly traded shell company FG Merger in a transaction that values the company at $3.5 billion.

A look at the numbers

It’s a large valuation for a company that, in a quarterly financial made this week, notes that “substantial doubt about the company’s ability to continue as a going concern is probable.”

It’s also large for a startup that posted revenue of just $402,000 in the first six months of 2025, (down from $708,000 a year earlier). Boxabl also posted a loss of around $41 million for the first half of this year, up from $34 million in the year-ago period, per the unaudited statement.

While those are strikingly low revenue numbers (and high losses) for any consumer-facing company on track for a public listing, what seems more noteworthy is the low tally of shipments of its prefab homes relative to initial demand.

Boxable says it has manufactured 744 Casitas to date and has completed deliveries of 285 Casitas in six states.

Between July 1, 2025, and Aug. 19, 2025, the company shipped one unit, according to the filing. Boxable said it is “in the process of aligning our production levels to match the demand for our products.”

Demand, but not supply

Should Boxabl manage to churn out prefab homes at advertised prices, which have gone up some over the years, it still has potential for plentiful demand. The company says it currently has deposits ranging from $100 to $5,000 from over 9,350 potential customers.

Of course, a deposit doesn’t guarantee someone will follow through on a purchase, even if the product does become available.

Nor, of course, does a SPAC merger agreement guarantee Boxabl a public listing. If the deal does not close by the end of the year, either Boxable or its SPAC sponsor may terminate the plan, per the merger agreement.

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