Lane

Lane is a Toronto-based property technology company that provides commercial landlords, property managers, tenants, retailers and vendors with a single platform for managing the office building experience. Its software covers access control, guest registration, parking, amenity and space booking, scheduling, maintenance requests, employee handbooks, tenant directories and building-wide communications. Lane supplies its own applications for these functions and also allows third-party applications to plug into the platform.

The company positions the modern office building as an ecosystem spanning retail, access control, digital directories, reception desks, wellness programming and parking, and aims to coordinate those services through one interface. During the COVID-19 period, the company described use cases including staggering tenant arrival times, coordinating contactless food delivery, rolling out contactless access and communicating operational changes to occupants.

Founding story

Founder Clinton Robinson has said the idea originated in 2014 when he visited a Brookfield Properties office building and observed that no technology existed to run the building's various services, which he viewed as a market opportunity. Brookfield became Lane's first customer and subsequently deployed the platform across its buildings in the United States and Canada.

Business model

Lane licenses its tenant experience platform to commercial property owners and managers on a subscription basis, with a stated focus on growing its client base.

Subscription fees paid by landlords and corporate clients for use of the software platform.

Traction

The company reported over 300 million square feet contracted through its platform at the end of 2019, a 320 percent year-over-year increase, and said in December 2019 that it was adding roughly 1,000 new users per week, with users performing 10 million actions on the platform. Lane also reported that landlords see a 20-fold increase in engagement with building services and amenities and a 13-fold increase in reach to occupants after adopting the platform.

Latest developments

In 2020 Lane closed a $10 million Series A led by Round13 Capital with participation from existing investors Alate Partners and Panache Ventures, stated plans to double its 40-person team by the end of 2020 and to grow its Denver office from two to ten people, and opened a new Toronto headquarters while recruiting for director-level roles across recruiting, product, marketing and finance.