Well, thank you everyone for joining. I'm Brendan Wallace. I am the cofounder of Fifth Wall, the sponsor of the SPAC that is merging with SmartRent. And I thought maybe to kick things off or just give a little bit of context on Fifth Wall as a firm who we are, how we first came to discover SmartRent as a venture capital fund, and ultimately, how we affected this transaction over the course of the last couple months. Fifth Wall is the largest and the most active investor in real estate technology.
What really makes Fifth Wall unique is the fact that about half of our capital comes from the largest owners and operators and developers of real estate globally, who are in turn the largest customers and end users and partners of the very technologies we're investing in, frankly, like SmartRent. And in many ways, that has defined our model. So what Fifth World does is we collaborate very closely with our strategic LPs. We understand their pain points. We understand which technologies they're imminently about to adopt, and then we invest in those companies and help shepherd their growth into these large institutional owner operator developers of real estate.
We started the firm back in 2016. I think in many ways, Fifth Wall today has become synonymous with real estate tech. And, really, our unique model of how we invest kind of explains the track record that we have had. So we are early investors, in some cases, first money in to companies like Opendoor and Hippo and States Title and BTS and Clutter and Blend. And that, in many ways, in some ways, explains how we first came to discover SmartRad.
So what Fifth Wall often does is we'll run an RFP on behalf of one of our strategic homebuilder LPs, and we will evaluate different technologies within the tech ecosystem, identify which company, we think is a relevant partner. We evaluated the smart home ecosystem in the early part of 2020. As we did so, it became just abundantly clear to us that SmartRent had emerged as the category winner for a number of reasons. One, the largest, institutional national footprint owner operator developers of multifamily had, I would say, overwhelmingly, endorsed, supported, and kind of grown with SmartRent. But, obviously, the management team and its hardware agnostic approach to building a solution for property managers was totally unique, within the ecosystem.
So in the early part of 2020, we began a dialogue with Lucas and the team at SmartRent. Lucas was kind enough to open up a closed series c financing to accommodate Fifth Wall's investment. Fifth Wall invested in March out of our North American venture capital fund. In February, Fifth Wall IPO ed its first SPAC. Fifth Wall was the first time sponsor to have a no warrants SPAC, and our thesis was that we wanted to take out to the public markets a business that very much resembled the same quality of the portfolio we have built in private venture capital markets.
So category leading business that is endorsed by the entire real estate community. And our thought was that, you know, these market leading businesses that have, you know, ready access to capital and private venture capital financings, they're going to be highly sensitive to the dilutive impact of the warrants that are typically associated with SPACs. And that what they're really gonna be looking for is a sponsor that intimately understands their business, can truly add value after the merger, and can, I would say, very compellingly tell their narrative to the public markets? And so SmartRent, candidly, is exactly the kind of business we, we hope to take out. It is a category leading business.
It falls within the fifth wall portfolio. We understand the business. We can speak very confidently to why the real estate industry has so overwhelmingly adopted this solution. And so we are really excited to begin a dialogue with Lucas and team. I think it's probably important to note that SmartRent will be Fifth Wall's largest investment in PropTech.
Because we are so confident in the business, and so confident in its growth trajectory, we've agreed to a very long term lockup of our sponsor shares. It's obviously an all primary deal. So this is exactly what we had hoped to do with Fifth Wall Acquisition Corp. So really excited to introduce this to the public markets. But maybe, Lucas, you can give your background and kinda the other side of that story from from your perspective.
Hey. Good morning, Brendan. Good to be with you. So, yeah, the the other side of that perspective is is, you know, we, as a company, we're looking at the ability to access the public markets and access durable public capital, and we are intrigued by the the SPAC market that we've all seen grow in popularity. But, really, there were there were two two issues that we felt were were limiting us.
One was the sponsor had no strategic value, but a lot of these sponsors were really successful in their own right and great people and great companies, but that they didn't really check that strategic box. And I think you'll see throughout this presentation, our company has always valued strategic money over just money, and that that's also now been true in this transaction as as we'll discuss. And the other issue was it was fairly expensive. As Brendan alluded to, with the warrant structure that comes with most facts, it's an expensive round of financing. And so we were thrilled when we saw that Fifth Wall launched an IPO and and had created FWAA and that not only did that check the strategic box, but they also were able as a first time sponsor to get a warrantless back to market.
We thought this is just the the perfect combination. So really excited to be with you today. Really excited to tell the story and, and share it with you a little bit more about what we're doing at at SmartRent. So and maybe I'll give a little bit of my background before we go into what we're doing at SmartRent because I think it it dovetails nicely into how we got to here. So, prior to starting SmartRent, I was the chief technology officer of a publicly traded REIT of single family homes called Colony Starwood Homes, now part of Invitation Homes, I n v h.
And as the CTO, I had lots of requests from different departments to better understand our assets, better manage our assets, and and from the marketing team to to provide better amenities to our residents. And to me, it was such an obvious answer. Like, we just need to make these homes smart homes. And that's where I really discovered the problem, which now we've solved with SmartRent, which was at the time, there was really no good enterprise management of smart devices, enterprise management of IoT. There were a lot of really cool devices.
I had a bunch in my house. You know, Brandon, you have a bunch in your house, but no one had ever said, how do I manage these at scale? How do I manage a 100,000 or 200,000 or a million of these devices? And there's two sides to to managing at scale. One is we're a hardware agnostic platform, so we we integrate hundreds of different devices onto one single platform.
Locks, thermostats, leak sensors, motion sensors, video, all come into one cohesive platform. Then the other side of that is we're gathering all this new data. We're bringing in all this new information. What do we do with it? And that's where our deep integrations with other pieces of software that are used to run the rentals business, multifamily and single family, come into play.
So let me give you an example. If a leak sensor gets wet in one of our apartment units that has SmartRent, it's connected to our hub. Our hub is connected to the property management software. We'll actually write an emergency work order into the property management system and dispatch a technician to solve the problem.
I think one of the things that, I think, really impressed us as we, you know, were running that RFP, on behalf of our homebuilder, Strategic LP, was that when you look at the smart home ecosystem, it's clearly a secular megatrend that consumers want smarter devices in their homes, and there's obvious benefits on the landlord side as well. But the challenge is that most of the ways to articulate that thesis from an investment perspective are either betting on large kind of incumbent tech businesses like Google or Amazon, or they relate to betting on individual smart hardware solutions. And the challenge in in making such a bet is that you face the the challenges of hardware investing, which is hardware margins, hardware competition, hardware replacement cycles. What's really compelling and I think unique about the SmartRent story is that this is a company that allows investors to articulate a secular bet around smart home adoption at an enterprise level, selling an enterprise grade solution and capture that upside with really attractive recurring revenue characteristics in a hardware agnostic way where you get to kind of free ride to some extent on the tailwinds of all of this r and d that is pouring into smarter and smarter devices for homes.
Yeah. So let's talk about the connected community, which is what we call our our our entire platform. So, really, from the parking lot all the way into the living room, we're able to bring better management to these properties. If you look across the landscape of what we're offering, we're the only comprehensive platform solution. And what I love about this business is any one of these products can be a landing point.
So we have the unique ability to sit down with an owner and an operator and say, what's the most acute pain point? What are you really struggling with today? Let us go solve that problem. That's an introduction to our platform, and then we can expand that over time. So you may start with building access control because your system is thirty years old and and it needs replaced today.
You may start with smart apartments because you realize all the benefits that that brings. But, ultimately, what we're seeing is owners and operators are adopting multiple solutions and continuing to bundle this to really try to create a comprehensively connected community. And one product that I think oriented to the is sort of a great landing spot and especially coming through this this global pandemic that we're all living through, you know, self guided tours. You know, this is something my background in single family homes. We had to embrace this early on.
We kind of invented the idea of a self guided tour that way in institutional rentals, because we didn't have any offices. We didn't have any leasing agents. So it sort of, you know, was necessity is the mother of invention. And what we found, though, in multifamily is that this can actually have huge operational efficiencies on the on the property and actually the ability to close more traffic. And through COVID, when the leasing office was closed and people couldn't give tours, this was keeping a lot of people in business, A great landing point for our product.
What's the value to to owners and operators? And and this is where, we talk about the different different drivers of ROI. To to me, one of the exciting things about starting this company was there were so many different ways to drive ROI. I never really seen a platform where you could underwrite it in so many different ways and get to a positive ROI experience. And so the first one that that owners are are experiencing is they get a higher rent if they have a smart apartment.
They're able to get a rent premium for offering an amenity their residents want. It's an upgraded apartment. It comes with an upgraded price. It's a it's a great way for owners to drive top line revenue. The other side of that is around expense savings, decreasing complexity, and better protecting our assets.
And if you look across this, there's a there's actually 20 or 30 different ways that we can we can drive value, but a couple big ones to highlight today. One is water. You know, I mentioned it earlier. Putting leak sensors into these units and mitigating against water damage has a huge impact on the p and l. Water is is the number one cause of damage in multifamily.
70% of the damage done in multifamily is done by water damage. And decreasing that is not only highly impactful to the p and l, also creates a better resident experience. No one likes living in an apartment where there's their blondes are ruined as water comes down the ceiling from upstairs apartment. And then the other side we touched on where we're seeing owners able to drive cost out of the business and better convert their traffic and better convert their marketing spend is using that self guided tour.
I think one of the things just to highlight here is, Lucas, you made the point earlier that you have these multiple entry points into a a property manager and a multifamily owner that can really solve whatever is most acute for them at that time from almost an application layer. But what's just really powerful is that you have this kind of quadruple threat of value proposition here, which is, you know, real estate owners are fundamentally simple, predictable animals insofar as the their adoption decisions with respect to technology. So you have top line revenue growth. You have OpEx savings, like, reduction. Right?
So just reducing the complexity, the number of applications, the number of logins the property manager needs at the asset level, and then really fast paybacks and ROIs. And so this is kind of the almost the the the quadruple threat that makes it a very no brainer adoption decision for these large institutional multifamily owners.
Yeah. That's right. And we'll we'll we'll we have a slide later where we look at a couple of case studies where I think you'll that really bears out that the proof of that. Another aspect of the platform is creating a really elegant resident experience. And we're we're just in the first innings of this, but having all of your smart devices in one app is really something that is a unique differentiator for for our company so that all these different hardware devices, if you had, you know, a a lock, a thermostat, and leak sensors without our platform, you'd have three different apps to interact with that.
This all for both the owner and for the resident comes into one seamless integrated experience. So we've talked a little bit about enterprise software layer, hardware agnostic, open architecture, deeply integrated. The last leg of the stool of our business that I'll orient orient you to is around our field services team. So another unique piece of our of our business is if you're an owner and operator and you make the decision to input our product, we're actually gonna come on-site with a w two team, and we're gonna captain this job to do this install. We bring on installer installers and trainers, w two employees.
We augment them with local contract labor, Canadian labor. It's something that's allowed us to scale very quickly because of the high quality of the install. Speaking of scaling very quickly, this is our unit density map as well as where we have employees growing every day. It's really exciting for us to be a relatively young company and say we have, over a million devices on the platform, over 400 cities, 42 states, and we have local teams already in 28 states and and growing. Leading presence in all major MSAs throughout The US.
And, really, this is when we get to Brandon, talked later about the the addressable market. I wanna go back and have everyone keep this slide in mind, is when we're talking about how many millions of units are, 28,000,000 institutionally owned units in The US, 15,000,000 single family rentals, there's not 28,000,000 in coastal cities or in urban areas. This is throughout The entire US. That's where we are. We're everywhere.
We're in San Francisco. We're in New York, but we're also in Phoenix, Dallas, Houston, Jacksonville.
I think when you look at a map like this, it effectively looks like a population density map of The US. This is where people live today. This is where the existing multifamily and residential building stock exists today. And today, obviously, smart home adoption is relatively underpenetrated. So the the TAM here is massive.
But I think a lot of what you see from an investor perspective when you do look at the smart home ecosystem is there are companies that have had some traction, but that fraction is in new development in Miami or New York or it's in very, very high end residential in Aspen, Colorado. I think those are obviously technologies that have much smaller TAMs. What's profound here is just this applies to all of the multifamily and residential building stock in The US today. This is a solution that is applicable and adoptable for those owner operators today. I can give a bit of perspective here.
This is effectively, you know, what Fifth Wall does. We are, in many ways, in the business of trying to know what the real estate industry is going to do before it does it. So to understand its adoption decisions of technology prior to it becoming obvious to the entire market. That comes obviously from the 70 strategic LPs that have invested in Fifth Wells funds, many of which are on this page today. As I mentioned, we ran this RFP looking at the entire ecosystem.
About a year ago, it was pretty abundantly clear to us that I think about five of these dominoes had fallen. There are probably five check marks on this page. But having surveyed the rest of the institutional, national footprint, owner operator developers of multifamily, we recognized that smart rent was going to be the industry standard solution. The same dynamic takes place with respect to enterprise sales to the real estate industry, which is whichever company can overwhelmingly sign up and engage the top 20 owners in a given space wins the category. That that company quickly is running downhill and becomes market standard for the entire real estate ecosystem.
It's an artifact of the fact that, you know, the real estate industry is a late adopting industry. So there are a number of owners that own 10,000 units, 5,000 units. These are smaller regional owners. And, typically, what they are going to do is they're going to look to the names on this list to see which smart home operating system have they adopted to ultimately make their decisions. So you have this very profound signaling effect and this hurting behavior that overwhelmingly leads to one company becoming a market standard technology.
So when you look at a page like this in light of that dynamic, this kind of looks like game set match for the multi in the multifamily industry when it comes to a smart operating system. I think the other dynamic that's probably important to call out here is that for the multifamily space, these multifamily assets trade fairly liquidly. They almost trade like stocks between, you know, different institutional owners. But what's different about SmartRent versus other kinds of enterprise software is it's both a software solution, but it also is on premise. Right?
This is installed, so it goes with the asset. And so you almost have this negative churn dynamic where there's this cross fertilization opportunity where when one of these large institutional owners trades an asset to a smaller, more regional owner, they obviously get that asset with SmartRent. So it becomes obviously a almost a, like I said, a downhill foot race, right, where you're just growing into the rest and the long tail of the multifamily industry, which is, as you can see on the left side of this page, enormous. Right? There there are a lot of units where nothing is installed today.
So this early lead, typically, I would say almost categorically, becomes deterministic over time. The same pattern plays out in real estate tech over and over.
It's really an important distinction to say that, you know, the these owners who have made the choice to go with us have done it in a very careful and methodical way. It's a big upfront capital expense to put our platform in. It's something that typically is done through an RFP. And I'll actually go to we've got a couple case studies. So this is sort of illustrative of what how most owners run the process, and this is two great customers of ours, Aimco and UDR, who were early adopters of our platform.
And so this sort of I think these illustrative to the rest of the names on that on the previous page. But we start out doing an RFP where we we come in and we we do a pitch similar to this, so they're more focused on on the benefits. Out of that RFP, we're looking to go to a pilot. And so you think about your average operator, multifamily owner, and say maybe they've got 50 or a 100 properties around the country. They're not gonna do it at all 50 at once.
Right? So we try to get them to do a pilot, which is maybe four properties or five properties, one per region, just so that they can truly understand the benefits themselves. Once we're through that pilot phase and they have verified, okay. I am saving money. I am being more efficient.
I am a better operator. Oh, and I'm also growing revenue. Then it's a foot race to how quickly can we deploy the entire portfolio. And so this is the case that's played out over and over again. It's an illustrative case study that we see happen frequently where it's, try it, get to know it, and then roll it out across the entire portfolio.
So it's not something we only do in the Southeast or something we only do in our class a or something we only do, as part of our portfolio. Really, it's universal. The idea of of increasing revenue while decreasing costs is a universal theme, really, in any business, but especially in in rentals.
And just something to highlight here. You know, this dynamic again plays out over and over in real estate tech. When you're talking about these large national footprint footprint owner operator developers. It's almost like you know the starting point. The starting point is no units or a pilot, and you know the ending point is, you know, something like 95% penetration and full saturation within a portfolio.
And, you know, that's dependent on a lot of different variables. But the same dynamic takes place where you have this highly predictable revenue growth that happens organically within these large national footprint owner operator developers of real estate. And so almost the the easiest way to say that is that your most expensive tax cost of customer acquisition are in your rearview mirror. These are the most expensive customers to win, to get, to do pilots, to have successful pilots because once you get them, you are again running downhill into full portfolio saturation.
Yeah. That's right. And so let let's let's talk about what that embedded growth looks like for us because it is an important you know, this this sort of concept of running downhill is really an important distinction in how we view ourselves different from a lot of things that have come to market this way, and that that really unique opportunity to to to invest. So if you look at our total customer base, these are customers who've signed the master services agreement with us. They've started to roll out.
These are customers who are in the process of rolling out our product. Those those customers own almost 3,000,000 units, 2,900,000 units in The US and Canada. Of that, we've installed about a 176,000. We have another 752,000 of committed units. So that's near term that owners have said, hey.
We've done our pilot. We've verified it works. It's back to back to this part of the curve. We're we're through our pilot. We're ready to get going.
And this year or next year, this is what we're gonna do. And so, really, as you're as you're sitting there as a potential investor looking at this and say, well, there's already to bring this weight, the the customer acquisition cost has already been done. Now it's just a matter of going in and harvesting that organic growth. But, you know, I like to think about it. If we if we didn't sign another customer ever, you know, this would be an incredibly impressive business.
This would be a great long term durable going concern. But, of course, the opposite is true. We're out trying to we're trying to sign customers every day, and we're being successful doing it. You know, we've added over over a 100 logos last year. We've already added over 20 logos in the first quarter of this year, you know, that that we are continuing to grow this.
But I think it and the investors are thinking about how do we derisk it is to say, well, even if not everything has to come true in this presentation, not all the growth trajectories that we're gonna touch on have to be have to be valid, and there's a really nice business here. So let let's let's pivot here from our current customers, which which is great to talk about, but talk about what what's the opportunity in front of us? So, you know, we're we've we've done an incredible job of signing up the largest institutional owners. We're the we're the biggest company out there installing, but this is a massive greenfield opportunity ahead of us that if you take just existing residential stock in The US, it's a $30,000,000,000 market opportunity. If you expand that out and you look at some of the new products we're bringing to market, we're gonna talk about that a little bit later, and moving into other asset classes, student housing, military housing, senior housing, offices, That's actually becomes an $80,000,000,000 market opportunity.
And then if you take that, and the other important thing here and part of why we're so excited to have FitFall as a sponsor is if you look then internationally, this is not a domestic only problem that we've solved. This is a global problem. And if we take this to the globe as we plan to do, it's a $200,000,000,000 market opportunity. Just staggering numbers.
And just to call out, you know, obviously, how Fifth Wall intends to help there. Fifth Wall today, obviously, is the largest investor with more owners and operators of real estate, you know, invested in its fund than any fund in The US. But the same dynamic exists in Europe as well. Fifth Wall is the largest real estate technology fund in Europe. We have some of the largest, most institutional owners in Europe as LPs in our fund.
And very much our strategy resembles SmartRent strategy, which is we try to engage with these large beachhead investors. So for example, in The UK, we have British Land We have Justina, the largest owner in The U in France. We have Merlin, the largest owner in Spain. And then in East Asia, we have Mitsubishi Estate, the largest owner in Japan.
We have China Vanke, the largest residential developer in Mainland China. We have Citi Developments developments and Tomasik and Keppel in Singapore. And so the intent would be to really bring SmartRent to all of these large international institutional owners and use them as beachheads to expand into those markets.
Another way we're looking to continue to expand the business is by enhancing the product offering and continuing to bring new products to market. We think there's a a real opportunity here to become the operating system for the resident. The way the resident uses their apartment, operates with their apartment, all the way from it, you know, looking for an apartment into living, into work orders, into living there, and and interacting with it on a daily basis. So, you know, we've we've created this road map actually when we started the business. So, Brandon, let's talk about another way we can grow and and our planning on growing, which is around continuing to enhance our enhance our product offering and make it more robust.
We really think there's an opportunity here to create a new resident experience and really an elegant way of finding leasing and living in an apartment. But but today, it's largely a lot of fractured different pieces of software that don't work together and don't talk to each other. From the customer side, it can be a very frustrating experience. We wanna make it a really elegant experience. And, you know, part of the part of the reason for doing this transaction is to fast forward that.
That we actually had this has been our road map for for three three and a half years now. We've had the same road map. What's new now is actually we can fast forward the the ability to offer these products by becoming a strategic acquirer. So instead of having to build everything in our in our internal workshop, we actually can go find best in breed prop tech companies and tuck them in so that they're day one accretive. And we think there's a real opportunity to to create some hyper growth around getting these products to market.
And, obviously, you know, this is something Fifth Wall, I think, is uniquely positioned to help with as well. We are, you know, the most active investor in real estate technology. We see the entire scope of technologies that emerge and are selling into the real estate industry, solving any variety of pain points and, you know, solutions for the industry. So when you look at a page like this, this is the aperture of our investment mandate. And across this, you know, on the on the far right of this page, you're looking at more kind of hardware smart home based solutions.
On the far left are more software based solutions, but it's important to highlight that all of these solutions are really attractive from a bolt on perspective for SmartRent because the way we conceptualize it is that it's almost like smart stuff came along at the residential level. The existence of all that smart stuff from different hardware manufacturers necessitated the creation of a functional operating system, an OS, that is enterprise grade and multifamily property manager facing. But that multifamily property manager wants fewer tabs open in their browser. They don't want more tabs open in their browser. In the same way the consumer doesn't want 10 applications to control their smart home, they want one.
The multifamily property manager wants the same. So there's natural synergies here insofar as the ability to layer in these kind of solutions that are today point solutions, CRM, payments, lease signing, and layer that into the same product that the resident is adopting in smart rent because this business is fundamentally a b to b to c business. So by virtue of selling into the landlord, you have almost forced consumer adoption, and the consumer really only wants the resident really only wants one application to engage with their landlord in the same way they wanna engage with their lock or their thermostat. So there's natural synergies across both the enterprising facing components of this business and the resident facing components of this business around this kind of m and a roll up opportunity.
So let's just let's just recap. We've talked about a lot. So I think it would it would make sense to just kinda bring it home, which is the the ability to access capital markets through this transaction and through having ongoing public currency will allow us to hypercharge the growth of this company. And we plan on investing in in sales and marketing and installation services team and continuing to invest in our software development team and our engineers, but it also is going to allow us to go into the other trajectories of growth that we've talked about, expanding internationally, expanding by acquiring companies, and expanding by moving into other verticals of commercial real estate. We just couldn't be more excited about all the embedded growth we have and then all the other additional inorganic opportunities that are out there that we haven't talked about.
And I just think it's really important to to bring home that while we think there's all these incredible ways we can grow and new areas we can get into and new verticals we can penetrate that, really, if you come to the financial overview slide, we're not asking investors to pay for that today. We're asking investors to participate in that upside. And so all of these numbers that we've put out, all of the financial projections really are oriented around selling our core business, harvesting that that internal growth, harvesting that embedded growth that we already have. And I think that, really, the KPI here is 85% of 2175% of 2022 business is already in our committed pipeline. So while we think there's an ability to grow much faster and grow in new ways, we're not relying on that for you to get comfortable with this transaction.
That's actually upside that we're all gonna share in, all investors are gonna share in, not just previous investors current and all investors sharing that.
And I think, you know, the way we look at it as an investor is when we, you know, conceptualize the kind of business that we wanted to take to market with our first SPAC, it was obviously one that would perform very well in the public market. And that, in so doing, creates a lot of highly predictable revenue growth. So you have kind of a clear revenue trajectory around these committed units, around these enormous portfolios that are rolling onto the platform. But there's kind of these multiple vectors of new growth. One is deepening that monetization at an asset level around m and a and these bolt on application layers that you can kind of connect to SmartRent that offer benefits to the landlord and also to the resident, and there's international expansion.
And there's new product set expansion within real estate. Right? So there's military housing. There's student housing. There's health care.
All of which have the same characteristics as what you've sold into today in multifamily. So there's kind of a a really interesting dynamic here where you have a true category leading enterprise solution with recurring revenue characteristics that is running downhill in its market, but you have this kind of venture like upside in the fact that this breakaway velocity that SmartRent has today can readily enable it to expand into new verticals and further accelerate monetization from the owners it has today as well as well as expand into new vectors of growth.
That's exactly right. And I I hope it it's clear through this presentation and through this video how excited we are to go harvest that growth.
So, Lucas, I think anyone obviously can access, you know, this presentation, publicly, and so you can kinda review it. But I think there's a couple points that I just wanna highlight that I think are really important for investors to understand. One is how you and how SmartRent has been so strategic in how you have done financings. Right? You've used financings very consistently as an opportunity to bring in the most strategic partners that can accelerate your business and bring the most important landlords offsides and really onto the smart rent platform.
So can you just talk about that historically and also how this transaction reflects that as well?
Yeah. I think it's a a really important point to touch on because at every financing we've done from our seed round to the to this round, we actually could have maximized value and taken less strategic capital. We could have taken, you know, higher higher higher start value, push the value higher, but without the same quality of capital. And we've always prioritized the quality of capital over the amount of capital. And that, you know, from our our first round that we did, our our seed round, we had offers that were at a much higher value, but the offer we took was from, a venture firm whose LPs all owned apartments and over a million apartments in The US.
So, well, that that seems to be much smarter money than just taking in, you know you know you know, VC dollars, generic VC dollars, we'll say. So what's really exciting about this transaction and this financing is we've done the same thing, and it's exciting for us that the third largest department owner, Starwood, is one of the anchors of our pipe. The second largest homebuilder by volume, Lennar, is an anchor in our pipe, and the largest institutional owner of single family rentals, Invitation Homes, is an anchor in our pipe. So this has been a theme from the beginning and continues even through this access to the public markets.
Yeah. And I think that's one of the things that is, I'd say, excited us so much about, you know, being an investor in SmartRent, both from our venture fund, but obviously in sponsoring this transaction, which is, you know, the the companies that emerge as category winners use financing events exactly as you have. And I think this merger is just so interesting. One, because you have these really high quality financial investors that clearly see this kind of downstream revenue growth that you have and just the compelling financial characteristics of this business. But, I mean, this is a hits list of, you know, the most relevant players in the real estate industry who are coming into this financing through the pipe.
Obviously, Fifth Wall is the largest, most active, kind of most synonymous investor with real estate tech is the sponsor of the transaction. But then beyond that is Starwood. Right? Barry Sternlicht, one of the most iconic names in the real estate industry that is this anchoring this pipe. In addition, Lennar, which is both a fifth wall LP, an investor in your business, and, you know, I think one of the most strategic residential investors in new technologies has given their track record.
They are coming in in a big way. And Invitation Homes, right, is coming in. So I just think this is so exciting because it not only is this an IPO effectively, but it's also just such a validation from the demand side of the real estate industry to everything that smart rent represents and the potential of your business. And so, you know, as a firm that loves rolling up their sleeves and driving collaboration between the real estate industry and new technologies that have emerged as category winners like yours, I would say we could not be more thrilled to be introducing this to the We are just so excited to be sponsoring this.
So, Lucas, any closing thoughts, or should we, just let investors peruse the rest of the materials?
No. We're we're super excited to to have Fifth Wall as a sponsor, to have the incredible invest lining up both both dedicated investors, long only mutual funds, as well as the the strategics that we discussed, and and just incredibly excited to take the next step in this journey.
Great. Thanks, Lucas.
Thanks, Brendan. Good to talk to you.