Occupier

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Founders: Andrew Flint, Matt Giffune, Erik Pearson
Founding: 2018
Mission: Building the future of lease management
Employees: 30 & ~30% Local
Workplace: Hybrid
Stage & Capital Raised: Series A & $15.5M raised
Investors: Alate Partners, MetaProp, OMERS Ventures, Second Century Ventures & Stage 2 Capital
Key Customers: Marine Layer, Bluestone Lane, DraftKings, Smashburger, Wingstop
Glassdoor Rating: N/A
Valuation (estimated): $40M+ (based on average venture math & current multiples after they raised their $10.5M Q1 ‘22 Series A)
^ this is a useless number from MGMT Boston. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!

Occupier is building software to help commercial tenants make better real estate decisions to drive the operational needs and growth of their businesses. This team aspires to build a platform where all commercial real estate decisions are made, facilitating access to data and collaboration required by all the stakeholders who require it.

Andrew Flint & Matt Giffune met at proptech company VTS, bonding over their prior careers as commercial real estate agents at JLL – Andrew in New York & Matt in Boston. They noticed technology adoption lagged in real estate and there had to be better ways to digitize some of the mundane incumbent workflows. 

It wasn’t too long ago when commercial real estate brokers would be putting physical site tour books together and running pipeline management meetings out of spreadsheets after manually transcribing notes from leasing calls. Then “proptech” began to emerge and Andrew & Matt were lucky enough to be revenue leaders at venture backed proptech startup VTS.

VTS’ goal was to serve real estate owners & asset management companies. But the companies that “occupied” their space needed better tools too. It felt like there was something to be built for tenants who managed large real estate portfolios. 

Andrew & Matt teamed up with technical co-founder Erik Pearson on nights & weekends to work on their project before signing their first customer: DraftKings. Occupier was born in 2018 to solve tenant real estate portfolio management administration. 

The commercial real estate market in the U.S. is a $25T market. With a T! (src) Real estate is typically the second largest company expense (historically) after payroll and there are more than 20,000 employers with 500+ employees (src). These companies have sprawling office & retail footprints to go along with their large employee bases and customer responsibilities. As you can imagine, companies struggle to manage their real estate. 

Let’s say you’re a large restaurant chain with 500 global retail locations. If you don’t have a sound system to track certain dates throughout your lease portfolio, you might miss a renewal option. An office occupier can painstakingly negotiate a 100 page lease but, based on certain key terms, may be blocked from expanding their footprint in a building. These are preventable mistakes with details hidden inside legacy documents and workflows. 

Lease management has had incumbents for decades but it’s amazing how user friendliness can win business by offering a flexible, customizable, and easy to deploy solution. Ease of use has been a big Occupier differentiator. Their platform handles the entire lease lifecycle in one place for their customers. As former real estate operators, they understand the importance of tracking transaction pipelines within a unified view.

Some competitors focus on specific verticals but Occupier’s view is that “a commercial lease is a commercial lease” and they can cover verticals broadly because of the platform flexibility & customizability. 

Two years into building the company, accounting regulations changed (ASC 842). Leases now need to be recognized on balance sheets, having a more direct impact on business operations and affecting compliance and audits. Occupier has been able to build tools to help companies navigate this new accounting treatment for their leases, creating an even more powerful pull for customers. 

Occupier is still growing through the post COVID commercial real estate contraction because they help customers more rapidly abstract data out of their lease documents. As employers have needed to get a tighter grasp on their real estate expenses (and strategies), they’ve helped customers centralize their data & workflows to make better decisions. As long as real estate decisions need to be made, Occupier can help their customers make more informed ones. 

From a product perspective they continue to deliver features for larger enterprises, moving up market after starting by selling to SMBs & mid market customers. They’re also starting to build AI functionality to help their customers drive better real estate decisions.

Occupier is in a fortunate spot to not need to raise capital right now and can patiently grow in 2024. Like many startups that raised in 2021, they had an ambitious operating plan and have responded to market changes by continuing to grow as efficiently as possible in this new environment. They still grew revenue over 100% in 2023 relative to 2022 and hope to double again in 2024.

One third of their employee base sits in Boston, one third of the team sits in New York, and they have the remaining third remote. Occupier is always on the hunt for good engineering talent and are adding to their team opportunistically this year. They’re looking to automate as much as possible and are experimenting with contractors too.

Operators to Know:

My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the Occupier team if I missed any up & coming operators internally

Key Roles To Be Hired:

If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:

  • What are the key competitive differentiators between Occupier and other proptech (+legacy) competitors?
  • What are the biggest external challenges as the commercial real estate & broader market continues to evolve? 
  • What is the long term vision for the company?
  • What are the most important milestones the company is operating toward in 2024?

We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about Occupier you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring more real estate transactions into the digital age. All tenants applaud your efforts. See you around town!

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