The rest of the 100 (in alphabetical order): Mihir Shah and Yishai Lerner, JLL Spark Global Venture Fund
In his nomination for this year’s Rising Stars, David Gerster, vice-president at US-based real estate developer Jones Lang LaSalle, said: “I wanted to call your attention to Mihir Shah and Yishai Lerner, who lead the $100m JLL Spark Global Venture Fund. They have made several bold early-stage property technology investments.”
Since the fund launched in June 2018, public deals include Skyline.ai, HqO, Dealpath, VergeSense, Honest Buildings, and Jones at the seed and series A stages, with cheque sizes from $500,000 to $2m.
As co-CEOs of the fund, Shah and Lerner bring complementary strengths. Shah was co-founder and CEO of Mob.ly and knew Gerster as a product leader at Yahoo and as a senior executive at Groupon. Lerner was also behind the sale of Mob.ly to Groupon after an early career building artificial intelligence for video games at Activision Studios. Both are also angel investors and have advised many startups, including Uber and Boom Supersonic.
They said: “We arrived at JLL about a year before launching the fund, with a broad mandate from CEO Christian Ulbrich to help the company benefit from new and potentially disruptive advances in proptech. This led to us acquiring a small startup, Stessa, which helps residential landlords organise all the data necessary to track the performance of their properties. As we learned more about the proptech landscape, we started to realise just how massive the opportunity is, and that led to our current model of investing in proptech startups.”
