Epum, an innovative Amsterdam and New York-based startup working to transform the commercial real estate development industry, has announced a €1.47 million pre-seed funding round that was over 150% oversubscribed and led by Dutch AI investor Curiosity VC, with co-investments from NP-Hard Ventures, Remote First Capital and Heartfelt VC.
The funding will enable the company to continue pursuing its mission to make the commercial real estate industry more data-driven, enabling pension funds around the world to rely even more on commercial real estate investment returns to support pensioners for decades to come.
The investment will also be used to accelerate the development and distribution of Epum’s commercial real estate research platform. Designed to help developers, investment managers and lenders identify the best development sites based on input parameters, the platform securely organizes proprietary data and uses purpose-built machine learning models to predict submarket trends and generate investment committee memos more than 10 times faster than traditional human analysts.
Epum was founded in 2023 by two former commercial real estate developers (Royden Cooper and Spencer Stieff), a former Adyen senior software engineer (Leonardo Costa), a former Globality senior data scientist (Tomasz Pietruszka), and one of the world’s leading researchers in the field of geospatial artificial intelligence, who holds a PhD from the Vienna University of Technology (Marvin Mc Cutchan).
“This marks an important milestone for Epm and we are excited to have more resources to serve our clients,” said Epm CEO Royden Cooper. “Commercial real estate developers are the primary catalysts of value in the commercial real estate ecosystem, as they are the architects of the future of cities. Following the last 12 months of industry volatility driven by rising interest rates, we are pleased to support developers with new tools to help them de-risk their projects and increase assets under management.”
According to the startup, Epum’s platform contains 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 that evaluates local demand factors, zoning, owner profiles, demographics, competitive supply, land area, topography, traffic data and more to identify and support ideal acquisition opportunities. Epum is already working with two national commercial real estate developers and one real estate private equity fund.
