What’s behind a big jump in January property tech funding
A version of this article first appeared in the CNBC Property Play newsletter with Diana Olick. Property Play covers new and evolving opportunities for the real estate investor, from individuals to venture capitalists, private equity funds, family offices, institutional investors and large public companies. Sign up to receive future editions, straight to your inbox. Capital deployment into property technology took a major jump to start 2026, even though overall deal volume didn’t change much, according to a new report. Fifty prop tech and adjacent companies raised approximately $1.7 billion globally during the month, according to a monthly report from the Center for Real Estate Technology and Innovation. That’s a 176% gain from January 2025, when 48 deals closed totaling $615 million. “The comparison highlights a critical dynamic shaping the current venture environment: deal count has remained stable, but capital deployment has accelerated sharply,” wrote Ashkán Zandieh, founder and managing director at CRETI. “Early-year data suggests that investor appetite has not broadly expanded across all stages, but rather concentrated around fewer, larger, and more established platforms.” The average dollar amount per deal rose from roughly $12.8 million in January 2025 to about $34 million in January 2026. A small number of very large transactions clearly had their impact, suggesting that there is not a general inflation in early-stage funding, but more willingness among big investors to make bigger bets. Seed, pre-seed and Series A funding made up only a small share of total investment. Venture and corporate rounds made up $459 million, “reflecting sustained support for companies beyond initial product-market validation,” according to Zandieh. Examples of that in January included Mews, Property Finder and Span, which saw infusions from large, multi-investor syndicates that included growth equity firms, corporate venture arms and institutional asset managers. “One of the factors driving the increase in prop tech spend is that generative AI is accelerating the functional obsolescence timeline of many technologies that large real estate companies only recently integrated,” said Brendan Wallace, co-founder and CEO of Fifth Wall, a venture capital firm focused largely on property technology that has roughly $3 billion in assets under management. “AI native enterprise software is already beginning to unseat established solutions, and the traditional advantages of incumbency and high switching costs are eroding quickly,” Wallace said. “This is unlike anything we’ve seen before at Fifth Wall.” At the same time, Wallace said, real estate-specific models are reshaping where organizations invest. Investment funding that previously went to data warehousing, business intelligence and large-scale consulting is being both rethought and reallocated to AI models that can deliver the same insights much more quickly and at lower cost. “As a result, real estate organizations are scrambling to reconceptualize their core technology infrastructure to keep pace with the unprecedented change that generative and agentic AI will bring to the industry,” Wallace said. Private equity investments in January accounted for $320 million, according to the CRETI report. Structured growth, strategic, and non-traditional instruments represented $444 million. This highlights the increasingly diverse and non-linear nature of the prop tech capital stack at the start of 2026, the report found. While the global run on prop tech was widespread across North America, Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia, European and Middle Eastern companies were particularly active in both early-stage and later-stage transactions. They favored construction technology, energy infrastructure, and real estate, according to the report. One month does not a trend make, but the sharp move does suggest that there is much more active capital favoring prop tech, especially as AI takes over the investment narrative. Bigger commitments are overshadowing startup investment. “For founders, this environment rewards clarity around business model durability and capital requirements. For investors, it reinforces the importance of distinguishing between headline capital totals and underlying deal composition,” said Zandieh.
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