Tishman Speyer is latching onto proptech with its special purpose acquisition company's latest addition.
TS Innovation Acquisitions Corp. has acquired Latch Inc., maker of software-as-a-service, or SaaS, platform LatchOS. The deal, which will take Latch public, values the proptech company at a little more than $1.5B.
Founded as the private company Latchable in 2014, Latch specializes in smart locks and building management software. About 10% of new apartment developments in the U.S. installed its tech in 2019, according to the company.
Latch will net around $450M in cash in the deal. That will include capital from the SPAC but also other investors, such as funds managed by BlackRock, Fidelity Investments and D1 Capital Partners. Tishman Speyer will receive a 4% stake in Latch.
"This transaction provides the capital for Latch to accelerate our product and market expansion and drive bookings growth," Latch CEO Luke Schoenfelder said in a statement. "Furthermore, Latch will be able to harness Tishman Speyer’s global real estate platform to more rapidly create new products."
Though its SPAC is relatively new, founded only last year, Tishman Speyer is no stranger to investing in proptech ventures, taking stakes in recent years in about a dozen of them, The Wall Street Journal reports.
“Real estate has been an industry that has been technology-resistant for decades,” Tishman Speyer CEO Rob Speyer told the WSJ. “It’s hitting this period of massive disruption. It’s entrepreneurs like Luke and companies like Latch that are leading this wave of disruption.”
SPACs, also called blank check companies, are an increasingly popular investment vehicle, including among large commercial real estate companies. They are entities set up to go public but that don't run their own businesses. Instead, SPAC capital is used to acquire other companies, taking them public in a reverse merger.
Last year, 248 SPACs were established, according to SPAC Insider, compared with 59 in 2019. Already this year, 67 SPACs have been established.
Last summer, a blank check company called PropTech Acquisition Corp. paid $523M for Porch, an online real estate and home improvement marketplace, and an affiliate of Lionheart Capital filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission to raise $200M to acquire proptech.
In November, Jaws Acquisition Corp., a SPAC backed by real estate investment mogul Barry Sternlicht, inked a deal to acquire Cano Health. That same month, CBRE formed a SPAC, CBRE Acquisition Holdings.
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