A San Francisco startup promising to end the spreadsheet era in corporate real estate announced Tuesday it has raised $18 million in Series A funding, with customers including Meta, Uber and Merck already using its platform to manage billions of dollars in lease portfolios.
Trebellar, founded in 2021, secured the round from Blossom Capital, with Haystack, Alt Capital, 1Flourish Capital and Bynd Venture Capital participating. The company builds what it describes as agent-based AI software that automates portfolio planning and analysis for corporate real estate teams, functions that have historically relied on external consultants and unwieldy Excel files.
The capital will fund expansion of engineering and sales teams, according to the company, as well as deeper development of its AI capabilities. Trebellar previously raised $3.5 million in seed funding led by Haystack and Jetstream on February 27, 2024.
Orchestrating Data Chaos
At its core, Trebellar attempts to solve a problem familiar to anyone managing corporate real estate at scale: information scattered across lease documents, headcount reports, utilization trackers and cost spreadsheets. The platform pulls these fragmented data sources into what the company calls a governed ontology, then deploys specialized AI agents to generate strategic plans and reports.
Those agents break into two categories. Functional agents orchestrate high-level planning, while domain agents focus on narrow areas such as lease administration, portfolio strategy and transaction analysis. The architecture mirrors how corporate real estate teams actually operate, with specialists handling discrete workstreams.
Trebellar claims teams using its software spend 70 percent less time managing data in spreadsheets, though the company declined to provide details on how it calculates that benchmark or what baseline it uses for comparison.
Early Enterprise Believers
Beyond Meta and Uber, pharmaceutical giant Merck and data management firm Cohesity have adopted the platform. Dave Gunter, Meta's vice president of global workplace services, offered an endorsement on Trebellar's website, calling it "purpose-built AI that actually thinks about the problem the way we do, not just another dashboard."
The company announced Tuesday that Dave Radcliffe, former vice president of real estate and workplace services at Google, has joined as an advisor alongside the funding round. That hire suggests Trebellar is building credibility among the small circle of executives who have managed real estate portfolios at hypergrowth tech companies.
LinkedIn shows an employee count in the 2–10 range as of several months ago, a figure that likely doesn't reflect hiring tied to the new capital.
The Team Behind the Platform
Diego Ferreiro Val, Trebellar's chief executive and a former engineering leader at Salesforce, co-founded the company with David Garcia Quintas and Adam Sewall. Garcia Quintas, now chief technology officer, previously worked at Google and Waymo. Sewall serves as chief operating officer. Craig Villamor, another Salesforce veteran, leads product development.
"Real estate has been the one back-office function still running on spreadsheets and outside consultants," Ferreiro Val told Citybiz. "We built Trebellar to give leaders the independence to make these decisions themselves, with the same speed and confidence every other part of the business already has."
That pitch resonates in an environment where CFOs increasingly scrutinize real estate costs. Return-to-office mandates have collided with excess lease commitments signed during the pandemic, creating pressure to optimize portfolios with more precision.
A Crowded, Confusing Market
Trebellar enters a corporate real estate technology landscape littered with pilot projects that fail to deliver. A survey from JLL, the commercial real estate services giant, found that while the vast majority of corporate occupiers were testing AI tools recently, only a small fraction achieved most of their stated objectives. PwC and the Urban Land Institute flagged AI adoption in real estate operations as a emerging theme in their latest annual trends report.
Competitors range from established players like Tango Analytics and OfficeSpace Software to newer entrants. VergeSense, Saltmine and Locatee offer variations on workplace analytics and space optimization. OfficeSpace announced a partnership with landlord Silverstein Properties in July focused on workplace data. Cambio, which also positions itself as an AI-native platform for corporate real estate operations, raised an $18 million Series A in January from a different group of investors.
The challenge for all these vendors: corporate real estate decisions involve long-term leases, complex negotiations and organizational politics that resist easy automation. Software can surface insights, but executives still need to make judgment calls on where to locate teams and how much space to commit to over five or ten-year terms.
What Comes Next
Ophelia Brown, managing partner at Blossom Capital, argued in the Citybiz coverage that corporate real estate represents "one of the last major categories AI hasn't reached yet," attributing the gap to the need for purpose-built technology rather than generic tools. Trebellar's careers page showed open positions across engineering and go-to-market functions in recent months, signaling the hiring push is already underway.
Whether AI agents can truly replace the institutional knowledge that veteran real estate executives bring to portfolio decisions remains an open question. Trebellar is betting that companies will pay for software that promises faster analysis and less reliance on external consultants, even if humans retain final authority on where to sign leases and when to exit them. The $18 million in fresh capital gives the startup runway to find out if enough corporate real estate leaders share that view.
