- PeerStreet, a platform for investing in real estate backed loans, announced it raised $60 million in Series C funding led by Colchis Capital with a consortium of institutional investors
PeerStreet — a platform for investing in real estate backed loans — announced it completed $60 million in Series C funding led by Colchis Capital with a consortium of institutional investors. Existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, World Innovation Lab and Thomvest Ventures also joined the round.
This round of funding will be used for helping the company continue to hire top talent and scale PeerStreet’s two-sided marketplace — which is the first and largest of its kind for investing in real estate debt.
“2019 has been an incredible year of growth for PeerStreet, and this funding round will accelerate that growth,” said Brew Johnson, PeerStreet’s CEO and co-founder. “The injection of equity capital into our business via the Series C, combined with strong demand from loan buyers, means we will continue to provide value for lenders, end borrowers, and investors for years to come.”
Along with the Series C funding round announcement, PeerStreet secured $4.25 billion in new capital commitments from institutions to purchase loans through PeerStreet’s platform. And these commitments will bolster PeerStreet’s existing suite of short-term bridge loan products and grow the recently launched 30-year buy to rent loan program. Launched in 2013, PeerStreet has had more than $2 billion transacted on the platform as of March 2019.
“We’ve been a strategic partner of PeerStreet for years as an investor in the company and in loans on the marketplace. Leading this round was a natural next step for us,” added Ted Conrads, co-founder and president at Colchis Capital. “We’re excited to be a part of their growth as they continue to innovate as the market leader.”
The investment opportunities PeerStreet offers are reviewed both algorithmically by the technology platform as well as manually by experienced in-house real estate and legal teams. And PeerStreet aggregates those loans for institutional and accredited retail investors — who in turn provide PeerStreet-approved lenders with capital. And those lenders then make loans to end borrowers who buy properties, improve them, and then either sell them to homebuyers or rent them out to tenants.
“I think our society is at a crossroads—there is a shortage of housing in many areas of the country and nearly 40 percent of existing homes were built before 1970. We can either build more homes and continue to take over green spaces, or we can up-cycle the existing aging and dilapidated housing stock,” explained Brett Crosby, PeerStreet’s COO and co-founder. “PeerStreet’s business model ultimately supports real estate entrepreneurs doing the latter, curing the capital constraints that have held them back and allowing them to reinvest in American communities.”
