Why We Invested in Northspyre

Craft recently led the $7.5mm Series A for Northspyre, a cloud-based intelligence platform for real estate owners, developers and project management firms. This is another exciting SaaS investment for us and I’ll be joining the Board.

Real estate is the largest asset class in the world but has historically experienced a lack of tech investment. Construction regularly ranks as the industry with the lowest technology spend relative to revenue. However, real estate is a highly collaborative industry that can have strong network effects when owners share tools with general contractors, architects, engineers, and other stakeholders. This points toward a massive opportunity for businesses that can sell into the ecosystem and drive an immediate ROI.

Enter Northspyre.

Northspyre’s cloud-based SaaS product enables teams to work faster, smarter and more efficiently by replacing error-prone spreadsheets, manual administrative work, paper-based workflows, gut decision-making and inadequate legacy applications. Northspyre leverages automation and machine learning to eliminate data-entry and the manual uploading of hundreds of documents like invoices and proposals from general contractors, subcontractors, and other project vendors. Instead of manually filling out a spreadsheet, developers can rely on a slick dashboard with up-to-date data.

Northspyre auto”magically” produces beautiful customizable reports showing a project’s actual costs relative to budget — in granular detail — while proactively identifying potential future overruns and other risks to the timeline and budget.

Northspyre auto”magically” produces beautiful customizable reports showing a project’s actual costs relative to budget — in granular detail — while proactively identifying potential future overruns and other risks to the timeline and budget. The product allows users to compare projects to one another and identifies outliers among multiple projects and thousands of line items. Collaboration and sharing are key components integrated throughout the product.

During COVID, Northspyre’s customers are seeing firsthand that a cloud-based product is even more vital than they thought because it helps them move projects along virtually. By leveraging automation, proactive analytics and artificial intelligence, project teams using Northspyre can reduce overall budgets considerably, keeping projects viable and profitable. An added benefit is that real estate developers who are reducing headcount can preserve institutional knowledge by housing all of their historical and current project data in the company’s cloud-based system.

The Northspyre team, led by Founder/CEO William Sankey, is very impressive. William has excellent founder-market fit having spent six years as a commercial real estate developer. After struggling to gain clear visibility into the detailed costs of his projects, William set out to solve his own pain point. Existing tools in the market were glorified spreadsheets and didn’t reduce the manual effort required to maintain them.

William is the prototypical founder who sees a problem and finds a solution: he built Northspyre to drive efficiency and consistency in an otherwise opaque industry.

William is the prototypical founder who sees a problem and finds a solution: he built Northspyre to drive efficiency and consistency in an otherwise opaque industry. The engineering team has built a full-featured product on a shoestring budget and the sales team has already accumulated some impressive logos.

We were initially attracted to the company because of its rapid growth; revenue grew more than 6x in the 12 months leading up to our investment. This growth rate is a strong indicator that the market sees great value in Northspyre’s SaaS tools and dashboards. The company’s perfect track record selling against the only competitive product in the space was another strong signal for us.

We’re excited to be on this journey with Northspyre as they bring a new level of visibility and collaboration to the next generation of real estate projects.

Congratulations to William and the entire Northspyre team. Welcome to the Craft family!