The story so far
A Canadian in the Valley, Jonathan Asmis came to the Bay Area to attend Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. There, he met fellow classmate, Alex Lofton, and upon graduating they founded Landed and joined YCombinator soon thereafter. Both shared a common passion for public service and civic leadership – Jonathan in Toronto with various NGOs and Alex in the field for the Obama campaign. The two of them recognized the issues around housing affordability and created Landed to provide down payment assistance to essential workers such as educators.”
The third theme that OMERS Ventures has been investigating in the US is proptech or the intersection of technology and the real estate industry. During the summer of 2019, Michael had come across a myriad of start-ups that were trying to revolutionize the residential home buying process and were particularly struck by new emerging financial models of home ownership. Whether the schema was rent-to-own, trade-in, ibuyer, down payment assistance, or unlock home equity, more and more Americans were clearly going to realize their home ownership dreams in the future in a different manner.
Michael’s prior fund was a seed investor in Landed and after receiving the introduction, Michael started meeting with Jonathan once a month for a few hours to compare notes on the industry and give operational insights over the course of the summer and fall. Eventually, Jonathan had enough of a sense of OMERS Ventures that he started a financing process, and in February 2020, OMERS Ventures led a $10.5M extension of Landed’s Series A.
Since our investment, Landed has weathered the pandemic with aplomb as its home buying activity has experienced a sharp V-shaped recovery and reached new heights. Landed has continued to launch new school districts and universities across the country and more recently offered the program to healthcare workers at healthcare systems such as Sutter Health and UCSF. The company has also introduced a corresponding mortgage program to allow its essential workers to also tap into home loans, in addition to their down payment.
