Epum, an innovative Amsterdam and NYC-based startup dedicated to transforming the commercial real estate development industry, announced a €1.47 million pre-seed funding round. The funding round was over 150% oversubscribed and was led by Dutch AI investor Curiosity VC, with co-investments from NP-Hard Ventures, Remote First Capital, and Heartfelt VC.
This capital will allow the company to continue to pursue its mission to make the commercial real estate industry more data-driven so that the world’s pension funds can further rely on commercial real estate investment returns to support their pensioners in the coming decades.
The investment will also be used to accelerate the development and distribution of Epum’s commercial real estate research platform. Designed to allow developers, investment managers, and lenders to identify the optimal development sites based on inputted parameters, the platform safely organizes their proprietary data, forecasts submarket trends with purpose-built machine learning models, and prepares investment committee memos over 10x faster than traditional human analysts.
Epum was founded in 2023 by two former commercial real estate developers (Royden Cooper and Spencer Stieff), one ex-Adyen senior software engineer (Leonardo Costa), one ex-Globality senior data scientist (Tomasz Pietruszka), and one of the world’s preeminent researchers in the field of Geospatial Artificial Intelligence (Marvin Mc Cutchan) with a PhD from the Vienna University of Tecnhnology.
“This is a significant milestone for Epum and we are thrilled to have more resources to serve our customers,” said Royden Cooper, CEO of Epum. “Commercial real estate developers are the main catalysts of value in the commercial real estate ecosystem since they are the ones who build the future of our cities. After the last 12 months of industry volatility as a result of rising interest rates, we are excited to support developers with new tools to derisk their projects and grow their assets under management.”
According to the startup, Epum’s platform includes the largest real-time dataset of urban zoning and planning activity across the United States. Based on this dataset and proprietary algorithms, the platform offers a powerful commercial real estate development site selection solution, which evaluates local demand drivers, zoning, ownership profiles, demographics, competitive supply, land area, topography, traffic data, and more to identify plus support ideal acquisition opportunities. Epum is already working with two nationwide commercial real estate developers and one real estate private equity fund.
