Last week, we closed on our latest Shadow Ventures investment when we invested in the Occuspace seed round.
I could bore you with all the normal platitudes of a “why we invested” post… like detailing their 450%+ growth since 2021, sky high LTV/CAC ratio, or other excellent SaaS metrics. I could tell you how their sensors are 93% accurate, or that they have a technical, highly intelligent, and growth oriented team...but I’ll spare you the normal details. Those are all givens or we wouldn’t have invested.
As part of our due diligence process, we shadowed the team on a few sales calls. The thing I couldn’t stop thinking about after these calls was the complete lack of friction in their sales process. In fact, one of our LPs took a call to help us with diligence and had emailed to set up up a multi-building pilot less than an hour after they hung up.
You might know that occupancy sensor startups have had more than $400M invested in them in the past decade. Occuspace is not the first (or second, or third, or fourth...) attempt to tackle this space. But they are the first to nail the struggle that real estate teams and space planners have. These users need to know their occupancy data to effectively do their jobs, but they don’t have the ability to pull wires, run power, get on ladders, mount sensors on the ceiling, or ruin the aesthetics of their space with a sensor every 30 feet. Nor can they spend thousands on pilots that, since they are drilled into the ceiling, they can’t get rid of if they don’t work.
Our thesis is that Occuspace has nailed that pain and devised the most accurate and frictionless occupancy sensor in the world. For the first time, they have unlocked invaluable data intelligence for the entire market rather than just institutional giants. They are democratizing data for billion dollar real estate decisions.
So what happens when you combine all those aforementioned off the chart metrics, superstar team, a frictionless sale, and an excellent product that end customers need so they can fundamentally be who they are... we might just have product market fit of a venture scale opportunity in the making.
Matt
