Commercial real estate startup Jones announces $12.5 million Series A

Jones, a commercial real estate startup which has developed a vendor network for tenants and property managers, announced on Monday that it has raised a $12.5 million Series A round. The round was led by JLL Spark and Khosla Ventures. Strategic players including Camber Creek, Rudin Management, DivcoWest, and Sage Realty also joined the round.

Jones’ customers include some of the largest real estate firms in the U.S., such as Lincoln Property Company, Prologis, DivcoWest, Rudin Management, Sage Realty, and JLL, among others.

“For too long, the commercial real estate industry has been held back by a burdensome compliance process that’s more focused on who can’t come into buildings than on how to get work done,” said Jones CEO and co-founder Omri Stern. “We’re excited to use this investment to accelerate our mission to make it easier to get work done while ensuring best-in-class compliance. We’re proud to have earned the trust of our clients, who turn to us as the risk and compliance gatekeeper for the commercial real estate industry.”

Jones was founded in 2017 to simplify risk and compliance for commercial property managers by leveraging software and artificial intelligence. Beforehand, strict insurance requirements that vendors and tenants needed were a hindrance to the system.

Jones’ network acts as a single source of compliance data, solving the approval process end-to-end. The company’s platform also makes hiring easier because its compliance data platform doubles as a trusted vendor marketplace. Its Software as a Service (SaaS) tool reduces the time spent and errors made for property managers and tenants when it comes to vendor approvals.

Instead of requiring 12 days to reach approval, the platform processes an insurance certificate in under one hour and achieves approval in 2.5 days, all with 99.9% accuracy.

“We get excited about innovation in the proptech industry that turns problems on their head — creating solutions while also creating new opportunities,” said Yishai Lerner, co-CEO of JLL Technologies. “That’s exactly what the Jones team has done by automating the insurance compliance process end-to-end, building a system of record that improves liability management and creating a never-before-seen marketplace for trusted vendors.”

The company has headquarters in New York City and Tel Aviv, and its services assist property managers to process tens of thousands of vendor and tenant certificates of insurance across nearly a billion square feet of real estate every day.