Deep Ink Ventures Buys San Francisco Office Tower for $11M

Deep Ink Ventures has bought a 16-story office building in San Francisco’s Mid-Market for the discount price of $122 per square foot, with plans to create a “vertical village” of homes and offices.

The Berlin-based investor paid $11 million for the 90,500-square-foot building at 995 Market Street, the San Francisco Business Times reported, citing an unidentified source.

The seller was Miami-based LNR Partners, which in April bought the mostly vacant Hewes Building at auction for $6.56 million — or 10.5 percent of its last traded price in 2018 of $62 million, or $685 per square foot — after New York-based Bridgeton Holdings defaulted on a $45 million mortgage.

The result: the unit of Connecticut-based Starwood Property Trust took a tower at Market and Sixth streets it bought for $72 per square foot and flipped it to an obscure German firm for $122 per square foot, for a 69 percent gain.

Plans by Deep Ink border on the touchy-feely, even for San Francisco, with the Business Times saying they could result in a “bro tech tower.”

Berlinhouse, an entity founded by Deep Ink contact Jakob Drzazga, a serial entrepreneur based in Berlin, modelled it on a two-month, 200-person gathering in Montenegro, envisioning co-living communities for technology sector participants — “uniting the users in a chummy online chatroom in real life,” according to the newspaper.

Plans for the project dubbed Frontier Tower SF include 4,250-square-foot floors dedicated to ventures like artificial intelligence, human longevity, biotech, “deep tech,” cryptocurrency, “human coordination,” neuroscience, plus music and art.

In other words, according to Berlinhouse, creating “a blank canvas for pioneers to shape the future of how our society will live in a post AI-singularity world.”

Berlinhouse also wants to convert offices into at least 50 co-living rooms for “in-residence scientists, speakers” and guests, according to the plans, posted to X by user @sf_mills.

The concept was linked to a so-called “network state,” a concept coined by former Andreessen Horowitz General Partner Balaji Srinivasan. A network state is a community that comes together — perhaps with a common goal, like pushing tech advancement, according to the Business Times.

It then buys property, then seeks to be recognized as semiautonomous by “preexisting states.”

Berlinhouse, a self-described network state, is seeking members for 995 Market, who must apply for and be granted “citizenship.” Members must pay $190 a month, or $1,800 a year, to walk through the lobby door.

It also says it wants to “integrate essential services” like health insurance and pension funds for members, and eventually negotiate “better visa deals with countries to allow our citizens to travel with less complexity.”

If all goes well, the concept could spread to other cities around the world, according to Berlinhouse, whose name is a nod to postwar East Berlin, where vacant buildings were turned into “clubs, art spaces, collectives and hacker houses,” according to marketing materials.

“Empty office spaces are becoming the new frontier,” the pitch reads.

City planners were not informed of Drzazga’s plans for the mint and white tower, expected to close early this year, according to Dan Sider, chief of staff for the San Francisco Planning Department.

— Dana Bartholomew