Dealpath is celebrating our first decade and our next phase of growth!
In 2014, we set out to deliver a new category of software and data services that would empower the world’s most sophisticated real estate investment managers to operate at scale with speed and precision, to make the best investment decisions, and maximize risk-adjusted returns. Time flies when you’re building an integrated digital platform powering the full lifecycle of real estate investments!
Looking back on our first 10 years of partnering with clients, growing our organization, and launching a new category and solution for real estate deal management software, the progress and achievements have been a total team effort. As the CEO and Co-Founder of Dealpath, I am proud, honored, and grateful to work with such a talented and dedicated team with unmatched ambition to deliver client value. I want to give special thanks to our two Co-Founders, Kenter Wu and Andy Lee, our Founding Team, Gary Kao and David Knight, and each and every member of our fantastic team along with our clients, partners and investors for their support over the years and as we venture forward together.
Today, Dealpath is proud to be recognized by the industry as the category creator, market leader, and most trusted platform for real estate investment management. Our revolutionary platform has been purpose-built from the ground up to drive investment performance from pipeline to portfolio management for both equity and debt investors. We are powering hundreds of institutional managers, including 7 of the top 10, and have supported more than $10 Trillion in global investment decisions across acquisitions, dispositions, development, and debt. With Dealpath, clients are evaluating +20% more deals than they did previously, making 30% fewer errors in underwriting and due diligence, seeing a +50% increase in productivity, and a +60% lift in employee satisfaction. These are big, hard numbers measured from many hundreds of successful implementations.
Building a World-Class Team to Deliver Compounding Value
Our world-class team is spread across our dual headquarters in San Francisco and New York City and our offices in Toronto and Austin. We’ve been backed with over $60M from top-tier venture and growth investors including Morgan Stanley, Blackstone, Nasdaq, JLL, 8VC, and GreenSoil, including a $43M series C funding in 2022. The company is well resourced and capitalized for the long-term as we work diligently to build industry-defining solutions.
We started a decade ago with a wildly ambitious goal – to digitize real estate investing, the largest and oldest asset class in the world, bringing data-driven decision-making, speed, and efficiency through powerful business process automation and AI. We saw consolidation in real estate investment management as the largest institutions sought to benefit from even stronger economies of scale and lower costs of capital. They required purpose-built solutions to accomplish this and Dealpath would be the trusted partner to realize this massive potential.
Our vision and mission hasn’t drifted a bit – the opportunity has only become bigger and more clear for an integrated, digital platform powering the full lifecycle of real estate investment management.
The Problems We Set Out to Solve: Disparate, Siloed Data and Complex Business Processes
We saw two fundamental challenges that real estate investors and capital markets professionals were facing.
The first was the inability to easily assess accurate, up-to-date data across disparate sources. Investment professionals were spending too much time, money, and energy manually trying to cobble together necessary information through repetitive activities of scouring a dozen different data sources and trying to curate and format this data, which was then instantly lost again in spreadsheets and emails. The result was missed opportunities, costly errors and oversights and a major drag on the speed and quality of work.
The second was complex collaboration requirements across internal teams and systems, as well as with external partners. Legacy tools and business processes weren’t designed for competing in today’s digital universe and scaling real estate investment programs. Teams were bottlenecked by a lack of visibility, issues with controls and data security, and most of all, the ability to get things done efficiently.
Real Estate has specific needs – securing a parcel of land, constructing and maintaining operations on it, and underwriting a physical thing in the real world is different from other types of investments. With this said, we’ve observed relatable solutions in other markets. For example, taking the way back machine to the Buttonwood Agreement in 1792, when 24 merchants and stock brokers agreed to standardize how they trade among one another.
Standardizing data and workflows enabled global capital to invest in local/regional businesses, driving scale and liquidity. This has evolved to what is today the NYSE, the foundation of today’s financial markets and financial infrastructure, including institutions like Bloomberg. Real Estate was still under the Buttonwood Tree – however the largest asset class in the world was poised for a belated and accelerated digital transformation.
Supercharging the Investment Process With Data, Automation, Collaboration, and Scale
The bright and inevitable future is that real estate will look more similar to equity, debt, and currency, which together comprise the four major asset classes globally. Real estate will have increasing regulation with accounting and data standards (ex. ESG), increasing liquidity through online exchanges with electronic trading, and it will be driven by institutional investors and top brokerage firms – the largest, most sophisticated pools of capital and advisory services.
Through our work over the past decade with hundreds of leading firms, Dealpath has identified these four key pillars for building value and operational excellence through investment performance engineering: Data, Automation, Collaboration, and Scale, which we refer to as “DACS“, our methodology.
DACS is a framework for understanding, competing, and operating in the digitally transformed business and network of real estate. We see a new breed of investment manager deploying DACS and growing an operational backbone without traditional constraints, unlocking value exponentially with inherent relentlessness in execution.
A Decade-Long Partnership with 7 of the Top 10 Real Estate Institutional Investors
This transformation did not happen overnight or in a vacuum; our team has worked tirelessly to deliver on this mission and vision of digitizing CRE investment decisions over the past decade. Our partnerships with hundreds of institutional clients across the CRE industry have informed and continue to drive our product roadmap. It’s truly a privilege to see firms of all sizes optimize investment performance with purpose-built software.
Dealpath makes it easy for clients to bring in new deals for initial screening and centralizing data at the top of the funnel, promoting adoption to build a data advantage with the full scope of every deal and asset that crosses their desks.
We provide powerful and intuitive workflow automation that works for our clients’ specific needs and drives efficiency across underwriting, investment committee, diligence, closing and related reporting to operate at scale with speed and precision to make the best investment decisions and generate optimal risk adjusted returns.
As the arms race for data-driven precision continues, we’re seeing the industry pull every lever possible to maximize value creation.
The Next 10 Years of Engineering Real Estate Investment Performance
At Dealpath, we believe that real estate is driven by people with information to shape our built world and that intuitive, purpose-built software and data-driven analysis empower smart decisions and performance. Everything we do continues to be in pursuit of maximizing the important work of real estate investment and capital markets in today’s digital universe and age of AI.
We’re just getting started and I couldn’t be more excited for our next decade of growth and innovation! Looking forward, it’s clear and inevitable that the next ten years will move even faster as Dealpath helps empower the digital transformation of real estate and real assets globally. There is so much more work to do, which is just the way we like it. Go Dealpath!
