Our investment in Inspace: Digitising every commercial property globally
OIF is excited to welcome a new exceptional founder, team and company to our portfolio, having recently led Inspace’s $4 million Pre-Series A round to fuel their global expansion.
Inspace is a 3D visualisation, management and leasing software platform for property owners, agents and current and prospective tenants and buyers, with a bold vision to monopolise the digital replica (‘digital twin’) of every commercial building in the world.
“From Day One we have had the vision to host the digital replica of every commercial building in the world and COVID has materially accelerated the adoption of our thesis in the industry” – Justin Liang, Founder and CEO, Inspace
It always starts with the founder: Justin Liang
We were introduced to Inspace’s founder and CEO, Justin Liang, over twelve months ago and since then, Justin has continued to consistently impress our team – we knew early on that we wanted to partner with Justin!
Despite Inspace being Justin’s first business, Justin is a talented entrepreneur and knows the commercial property and venture capital space well. Justin was a former investor at AMP Ventures, specialising in AI, FinTech and AR / VR technologies, and made it onto the Forbes 30 under 30 list.
What most impressed us about Justin was his thoughtfulness on the customer problem, his vision for what technology could deliver, his ability to build a culture-first business and attract and retain the best team and customers, and his thesis on the business opportunity.
As we built the relationship with Justin for over twelve months and as we learnt more about him, his ability to execute and spoke to customers who love partnering with Inspace, we grew increasingly more confident that Justin is a founder we want to back and that Inspace has a unique and very large opportunity ahead of it.
Physical real estate inspections are becoming a thing of the past …
Traditionally, when a tenant or buyer is searching for office space, a leasing broker takes them on a physical walking tour to inspect a series of buildings, or they look at photos or a video walk-through. All up, the process is expensive, time-consuming and lacks actionable data insights.
The increase in quality of 360-degree cameras, and their decreasing cost, is an enabling technological leap that means we now have the capability to create truly ‘virtual tours’ of spaces easily and cheaply. This allows viewers to walk through a space online, at any time and from any place or device.
Enter the COVID-19 pandemic and overnight there was an enforced shift away from physical inspections to digital walk-throughs, materially accelerating the demand for and the adoption technology for virtual property tours. Every real estate company, buyer, agent, tenant, and user now needs innovative ways to buy, sell, lease, and interact with property in the digital world. We see this as an acceleration of an inevitable trend and one that Inspace is perfectly positioned to capitalise on.
The Inspace solution
Inspace Stack launched in September 2020 and it is a SaaS platform that hosts 3D ‘digital twins’ of commercial properties, enabling commercial, industrial, and residential property landlords and agents to share web-based 3D replicas of their buildings to show potential buyers and tenants online.
The technology behind Inspace Stack means landlords can:
1. Collect real-time market intelligence during a campaign, such as identify the audience by location and source and analyse audience engagement
2. Generate a greater number of high-quality leads
3. Store real-time tenant information like company, space occupied and lease expiry.
Ultimately this allows Inspace Stack to operate as a ‘single source of truth’ for landlords and a very powerful marketing engine. Using Inspace Stack, landlords can lease their spaces 30% quicker, saving them up to millions per year in lost rent for a single building.
Inspace’s customers are also expanding Inspace’s use case beyond leasing. Use cases now include asset reporting, asset sales and tenant inductions. Inspace now enables over $1 billion in property transactions per month and has already built up an incredible customer base including CBRE, JLL, Colliers, Blackstone, Brookfield, Lendlease and more.
“Inspace helps us visualise, plan and co-create spaces with our tenant customers, and we’re proud to have worked with Justin and the team since day one” – Sheridan Ware, Chief Technology Officer, Charter Hall
“JLL has successfully partnered with Inspace in creating virtual tour presentations for both existing spaces and new developments, helping businesses make decisions effectively in a changing market” – Tim O'Connor, National Head of Office Leasing, JLL
Building a defensible moat – Inspace has multiple ways to win
Inspace believes that every commercial property space will host ‘virtual tours’ by 2025, and the company is primed to ride this technological wave as more of the built world digitises.
We see that there are three ways in which Inspace can accelerate growth and build its defensible moat
1. Expanding to new customers and geographies
2. Expanding within existing customer portfolios
3. Expanding new product modules to existing buildings
By growing the number of virtual inspections on its Stack platform, Inspace’s vision is to monopolise the exclusive data collected from the ‘digital twin’ of each commercial building on a global scale. The more tours hosted on the platform, the larger and more valuable Inspace’s global exclusive dataset becomes. The Stack product has potential to represent a significant source of recurring revenue and is the company’s stronger defensible moat, as the product embeds itself across marketing assets such as websites, property listing sites and tenant proposals.
Whilst there are existing competitor products that seek to offer similar components to Inspace, Inspace is largely differentiated against many competitors who have only tailored their product towards the residential real estate market, do not provide the same level of detailed analytics focused on sales and leasing and are more costly in subscription pricing.
The capital raise enables Inspace to build on the rapid growth of its Stack product in eight target geographies: Australia, the US, the UK, China, Japan, Canada, Singapore, and Germany. In these markets alone, there are approximately 14 million commercial buildings, which is an addressable annual recurring revenue opportunity in the tens of billions.
Already being used by some of the world’s leading real estate companies we believe in Justin and the Inspace solution and at a perfect time to scale, this is only the beginning of an enduring and strong partnership between Inspace and OIF.
Welcome to the OIF family Inspace!
OIF is a leading Australian venture capital firm that champions exceptional founders, driven by purpose, who add material value to their customers, markets, and communities. OIF invests in early-stage companies with innovative, high-growth and disruptive technologies with demonstrated market demand.
Founded in 2016 by a team of founders, entrepreneurs, and business-builders, OIF has raised two funds to date, managing approximately $300 million and closing its upsized Fund II in mid-2021 for over $115 million. OIF is exclusively backed by founders, business-builders, ASX executives, HNW and family offices. While focused on backing Australian founders, OIF seeks to partner with ambitious founders who have the opportunity to expand into the US and global markets and OIF can support such expansion through OIF’s extensive US network of potential customers and investors.
The OIF team have backed some of Australia’s emerging technology companies including Go1, Instaclustr, Assignar, Enboarder, Kasada, Circle In, Adventus.io, Clear Dynamics and more.
