Backend Engineer

Exclusive: Cambio lands $18M at $100M valuation for ai-powered commercial real estate software. Cambio, a startup that has built AI-powered commercial real estate software for institutional investors, has raised $18 million in a Series A round at a $100 million valuation, it tells Crunchbase News exclusively. Maverick Ventures led the financing, which included participation from Y Combinator, Adverb and angel investors from OpenAI, Anthropic and Notion, among others. Founded in 2022 by former institutional commercial real estate operators Leia de Guzman and Stephanie Grayson, Cambio has now raised a total of $22 million. It participated in Y Combinator's summer 2022 cohort and then went into "R&D mode." The San Francisco-based company launched its offering at the end of 2023, and de Guzman claims it has since seen "rapid adoption" across enterprise customers and geographies - scaling to 35 countries and to more than 2 billion square feet in assets. It recently opened a London office to support EU and APAC growth. From 'messy' to investment-grade data. Put simply, Cambio uses large language models and agentic artificial intelligence workflows to turn "messy building data into investor-grade decisions and reporting." And it claims to do so within minutes. "Commercial real estate owners sit on thousands of pages of unstructured documents - spreadsheets, PDFs, invoices, energy audits, regulatory filings - that historically required months of manual analysis," de Guzman told Crunchbase News. "Cambio applies large language models and agentic AI to ingest, reason over, and synthesize that data automatically, delivering investment-grade capital and compliance decisions in minutes." Cambio, she said, is architected around agentic AI software that can reason across unstructured data, run multi-step analyses, and "continuously adapt as regulations, assets, and market conditions change." In a nutshell, it aims to help institutional investors figure out where to deploy capital, which assets to prioritize, and how to maximize returns. Customers include Oxford Properties, Nuveen, Principal, BGO and Beacon Capital, among others. The market opportunity, according to de Guzman, is enormous: commercial real estate is estimated to be a $20 trillion-plus industry in the U.S. alone. In 2025, global real estate-related startups pulled in about $10.5 billion in seed- through growth-stage financing, per Crunchbase data. That's up about 17% from $9 billion in 2024. An industry track record. Part of Cambio's strategy is to have built a (largely female) leadership team that has directly worked in the space it is trying to serve. De Guzman and Grayson began their careers at large institutional firms such as KKR and Oxford Properties. The startup also recently hired Goldman Sachs alumna Lizzie Leon to serve as head of product innovation. Katerina Kaimakamis, formerly of Oxford Properties and CBRE, has been tapped to serve as head of Cambio's European and APAC business. The moves from institutions to a startup serving them reflect a broader shift happening in commercial real estate, noted de Guzman - the choice "to step inside AI transformation, and not just observe it from the sidelines." Cambio operates an enterprise SaaS revenue model. It plans to use its new capital primarily to scale product and engineering. Ryan Isono, managing director at Maverick Ventures, told Crunchbase News via email that his firm was impressed with the fact that Cambio's founders had spent more than two decades running commercial real estate portfolios. "That lived experience matters," he said. "It gave them an intuitive understanding that this wasn't a tooling problem - it was a workflow problem." Maverick was also impressed by the fact that Cambio wasn't trying "to bolt AI onto existing processes." 'Re-architecting the workflow' "Cambio isn't automating around the edges, it's re-architecting the workflow end to end in an AI-native way, with a deeply product-minded approach," Isono said. "Knowing what to build, which workflow to wedge into, and how to sequence products requires having lived these workflows, which Leia and Steph have." The investor also praised the startup's technical team, noting that CTO Leon Chen was one of the earliest backend engineers at Faire, a marketplace and wholesale platform that was valued at nearly $13 billion in 2022. That technical team, he said, also includes Ph.D.s with "deep expertise" in building science. "That matters because commercial real estate is fundamentally tied to the physical world. Much of the data isn't clean or fully digitized, and automating it is meaningfully harder than in purely digital domains," Isono said. "Solving that unlocks a uniquely valuable dataset that compounds over time." Related Crunchbase queries:

Industry-Trusted Platform Ensures Uninterrupted Access to Critical Energy Data and Analytics for Commercial Real Estate ProfessionalsNEW YORK, May 9, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Cambio (www.cambio.ai), the leading AI-driven commercial real estate operations platform, today announced the immediate launch of Cambio Vault, a free alternative to ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager (ESPM) in response to mounting uncertainty over the future of the EPA's widely used building benchmarking tool. Last year, EPA's ENERGY STAR program for commercial buildings and industrial plants helped businesses and organizations avoid $14 billion in energy costs