Workplace experience platform Lane announced it is expanding into the U.S. following a $2.5 million round of funding from Alate Partners (partnership built between Dream and Relay Ventures), Panache Ventures and the Colliers Proptech Accelerator (managed by Techstars). With this round of funding, Lane will make new hires and open offices in the U.S. including New York (opened in April) and Los Angeles (opening in Q3 2019).
This expansion is part of a strategic plan for dominating the proptech space as a way to transform how people interact with the places they work and the people they work with. Lane also established partnerships with Brookfield, Dream, and Colliers for bringing their global square foot coverage to 68 million.
Lane was founded by CEO Clinton J Robinson and CPO Kofi Gyekye in 2014 with a goal of providing tenant engagement solutions tailored for commercial office buildings. Robinson launched his first successful company at age 15 and continued using technology for solving problems in the media, healthcare, and retail spaces. And Gyekye is known for having worked with designers, developers, and marketers to make workplace experiences more accessible.
“This is an exciting time for Lane. We’ve been working away on the backend to make the most impactful, useful platform for both property managers and users and look forward to bringing our technology to the US and improving and redefining what a workplace is and can be,” said Robinson in a statement.
Ever since Lane launched in 2015, the company was able to increase engagement 20 times its previous amount in existing buildings while seeing an influx of tenants, office managers, and landlords partaking in building-centric activities. And companies have seen a 13-fold increased reach involving employee communication and interaction. Plus partners have experienced 2.2 times the ROI from improved productivity.
“You’d think a company playing such a vital role in the operation of a commercial building would start small, perhaps a pilot with a single tenant, or maybe one building in a small portfolio. This was not the case for Lane. Their first customer was a global real estate powerhouse, Brookfield, who looked to the Lane team to light up a platform for the best Class A assets nationwide. It takes a special breed of entrepreneur to make that happen, and to build a platform that scales well beyond that initial roll-out,” added Relay Ventures partner Jake Cassaday Partner.
