VC Firm Joins Pier 70 in Significant Office Lease

Brookfield Properties just landed a major office tenant at San Francisco’s Pier 70 waterfront megaproject in the Dogpatch.

Venture capital firm General Catalyst signed a lease for 70,000 square feet at Pier 70’s Building 12, taking the entire third floor of the renovated structure, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. Building 12 at 1070 Maryland Street spans approximately 200,000 square feet and was once home to shipbuilding operations during World War II. The firm’s move into 70,000 square feet makes it one of the largest venture capital tenants in San Francisco history by footprint, according to the Chronicle.

General Catalyst is moving from a roughly 12,000-square-foot office at 75 Hawthorne Street in South of Market.

Building 12 has already attracted retail tenants such as Breadbelly and Standard Deviant Brewing and is the first part of Brookfield’s plans for Pier 70, the San Francisco Business Times reported. New York-based Brookfield has been approved to turn the Pier 70 property into as many as 2,150 homes and nearly 1.8 million square feet of commercial space.

Brookfield initially planned to deliver the first phase of Pier 70, including hundreds of homes and almost half a million square feet of offices, between 2022 and 2024, though the pandemic slowed down those efforts. So far, Brookfield has delivered new site infrastructure and renovated Building 12, both of which were completed before construction stalled. The 28-acre waterfront redevelopment is a public-private partnership between Brookfield and the Port of San Francisco and was valued at $3.5 billion in 2020.

General Catalyst manages $43 billion in assets and has backed Airbnb, Instacart and Anthropic — all companies with San Francisco headquarters. It won’t be the only venture capital firm at Pier 70, as Monograph Capital inked a lease there in 2024. Other forthcoming significant portions of the Pier 70 development include Elevation XR’s plans for an event venue similar to Las Vegas’ Sphere called Elevation Sky Park, set to open this summer.

— Chris Malone Méndez