AI Specialist Brokerage Raise Commercial Acquired by JLL

Raise Commercial Real Estate, the go-to brokerage for artificial intelligence companies to land new offices in San Francisco, has been snapped up by JLL.

The Chicago-based brokerage acquired the locally based Raise Commercial for an undisclosed price, the San Francisco Standard reported.

The nine-year-old tech-powered brokerage was founded by Justin Bedecarre. The deal is expected to close in coming weeks.

As part of the deal, JLL will gain access to Raise’s clients and integrate its software across the 110,000-person firm. Bedecarre will report to Andy Poppink, a former professional basketball player who now leads JLL’s Markets Advisory office.

“It is sort of like David joining forces with Goliath,” Bedecarre, CEO of Raise, told the Standard. “Best week of my life.”

“I look at this as a means to an end,” he explained. “We built something no one has been able to build before, and there is no better way to scale it for our clients — some of whom are going global — than to join a Fortune 200 company that believes in us.”

After OpenAI and Anthropic raised billions for growth, they had called Raise Commercial Real Estate to facilitate what were San Francisco’s largest office leases in 2023 and this year.

The startup brokerage also has a passel of emerging AI clients eager to move into bigger offices.

Bedecarre founded the firm in late 2015 as HelloOffice after leaving his post at Cushman & Wakefield a few years earlier.

While in his 20s, he aimed to start developing technologies for the commercial real estate industry, and launched two startups. One firm, 42Floors, a search firm for commercial real estate, didn’t last. HelloOffice was renamed Raise in 2020.

Bedecarre’s initial startup went through Y Combinator, when Sam Altman ran the accelerator. The two continued working together on office deals after Altman took over OpenAI.

Raise has raised $26.5 million from investors, including Initialized Capital, Founders Fund and Point72 Ventures.

Part of the firm’s success can be attributed to its proprietary technology, an Airbnb-like platform for companies to manage their real estate holdings in one place. Features include the ability to measure in-person office usage.

Bedecarre and his staff then built a traditional brokerage service on top of those products and bundled them for sale to clients. The formula helped Raise beat larger real estate firms to clients like OpenAI and Anthropic.

“We just stood out from the crowd,” Bedecarre told the Standard. “No one else was offering what we had.”

— Dana Bartholomew