Patrizia AG steps in to swallow up insolvent platform BrickVest
The Augsburg-headquartered PATRIZIA AG stepped in to buy the troubled digital investment platform BrickVest, and said it will continue to promote BrickVest’s further development as an independent open platform bringing together disparate investor groups with deal sponsors and product providers.
London-based BrickVest, founded in 2014 by Thomas Schneider and Emmanuel Lumineau, was a shooting star in the proptech scene, raising more than €12m in various financing rounds before hitting the buffers in November last year, filing for insolvency. The company has more than 20 employees in offices in London, Berlin and Nice. At least 50 different investors had put money into BrickVest, including German Pfandbriefbanks Berlin Hyp and Aareal Bank.
The BrickVest platform was aimed at professional investors, rather than the private investors favoured by the crowdinvesting platforms, with investors able to participate in offerings from €1,000 upwards, although the classic BrickVest ticket was between €15,000 and €150,000. The company prided itself on being “the only fully-regulated online real estate platform in Europe”, according to co-founder and CIO Thomas Schneider last year, before the company ran out of money. Schneider has since left the company, along with Matthias Arnheiter, who was installed on the board by Berlin Hyp to safeguard the bank’s interests, as third-largest shareholder (followed by Aareal).
The takeover by PATRIZIA will give the rejuvenated BrickVest access to PATRIZIA’s burgeoning global industry network, including more than 350 institutional investors and industry partner, along with over 200 banks and financial institutions worldwide.
PATRIZIA has been successively investing in related proptech enterprises as it itself has grown to become an investment manager with more than €42bn of assets under management worldwided. Other companies in which it has taken strategic stakes are AI platform Cognotekt, data management service provider EVANA, the global rater of digital connectivity WiredScore, and Control.IT, a leading asset and portfolio management software in German-speaking markets.
According to PATRIZIA’s founder and CEO, Wolfgang Egger, “We are convinced that BrickVest has the potential to become the go-to global and independent industry platform of choice for real assets. Therefore, it is essential for us that BrickVest remains independent and provides full transparency, convenient access as well as much broader choice to all investors. We will ensure that BrickVest has access to our deep industry knowledge, broad investor network and expert market intelligence which makes the platform even more attractive.”
PATRIZIA’s Chief Technology Officer Dr. Manuel Käsbauer added, “BrickVest’s platform approach and technology…directly connects investors to a wide-ranging and easily accessible portfolio of real asset investment solutions from different investment firms. Our clear goal is to engage more industry players and to attract a broad variety of real asset investment opportunities to the platform.” (ssk)