Investment in the built environment – and the technology that is helping companies improve its efficiency, design, and safety – is crucial if our future world is to be empowered by technology.
That’s why the work of Prudence – an early-stage venture capital company specialising in firms that deliver that technology – is vital. Prudence, based in New York, has just closed an $80m Fund III round, bringing its total assets under management (AUM) to $230m.
The funding ethos
Since it was founded in 2009, the company has been pouring cash into early-stage technology companies across a range of verticals, in everything from construction to real estate, infrastructure to climate and energy adaptation.
If this sounds like the company’s been throwing money at developments at random, nothing could be further from the truth – the team of four behind Prudence’s investment strategy (Gavin Myers, Jordan Viniar, Julia Brino, and Melissa Landry Koller) keep to the spirit of the company’s name. Every investment is considered, and the company has funded tech-first projects with clear goals that take our way of working with the built environment forward.
Gavin Myers, Managing Partner, explained: “We are excited to continue investing behind best-in-class founders who are transforming the built world through the development of advanced software solutions, data infrastructure capabilities, and artificial intelligence applications. Companies in the built environment have pushed the boundaries of what can be accomplished with people and processes, and their futures will be defined by how effectively they can solve pain points with software and automation.”
That’s the ethos behind Prudence’s investment strategy – helping founders deliver a technology-first future in the built environment.
Environment built with Prudence
And having done it for 15 years, Prudence has some solid successes under its belt, both in the US and across the world.
CASAFARI, for instance, a software-based real estate platform which was awarded Series A funding from Prudence in 2018, has its headquarters in Lisbon, Portugal, while AI Clearing, which got 2019 Series A funding for its use of AI to monitor progress and quality control on large infrastructure construction sites, in based in Austin, Texas.
Meanwhile, Blockchain, based in London, England, got Prudence Series A funding in 2011, and has since established its reputation as the world’s leading crypto finance house.
The new $80m funding round from Prudence is significantly larger than the company’s last injection of investment in 2020, which amounted to $65m. That means Prudence has been able to literally spread the wealth even further this time, but its strategy remains considered and holds to a firm model. It makes what it calls “concentrated, high-conviction investments” in early-stage companies with advanced technological capabilities, large market opportunities, and great founding teams.
Solving technical problems
Prudence comes in at anywhere from Seed funding to Series B stages, and acts as both an investor and a board member, to ensure that the early stages of tech-dependent business development go smoothly.
“Our principal focus is investing in and building differentiated, defensible, and durable software businesses,” said Jordan Viniar. “Founders choose to work with us because of our sector specialization and nuanced understanding of the technical problems they are trying to solve in these large and underdeveloped markets.”
One of its most recent investments, in VendorPM, is a clear example of that approach. The company is developing a software platform to automate vendor management and compliance for property managers.
Prudence will continue to work with partners who use significant new technologies, from generative AI to digital twins to process automation through machine learning, to answer either the big questions in the built environment, or the smaller problems along the way that can be better solved by a modern, technology-led approach.
