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UNICORN

Venture Path · 2015

Bowery

In fall 2015 we invested in Bowery to take a proof-of-concept to market. With $150k in development services from Unicorn as a venture studio, we shipped the MVP in six months — helping Bowery raise $6.2M the following year and reach a valuation over $350M.

Bowery commercial real estate appraisal platform hero image

$6.2M

raised in year one

$350M+

valuation

$61.8M

raised to date

Illustration of files and databases syncing data

Normalizing Data

Commercial appraisal in NYC is brutal. The city packs in office buildings, retail spaces, and multifamily residential — each demanding its own data and analysis — while relentless development keeps the market moving faster than appraisers can track.

We helped build a SaaS product that meets that challenge head-on. Bowery gives appraisers a comprehensive platform that does the heavy lifting: detailed property information, market trends, comparable sales data, and advanced analytics and visualization tools. By streamlining the appraisal process and putting real insight at appraisers’ fingertips, Bowery makes it easier to value commercial properties confidently and accurately across its markets in the U.S.

Illustration of gears and files working in harmony to process data

Data Parsing and Automation

Step one: scrape, scrub, and clean massive amounts of data. Municipal records on commercial buildings are rich but messy. Coverage varies wildly between cities, formats and systems rarely match, and local economic and regulatory quirks complicate everything. Through a powerful backend, we forged a standard schema out of that chaos.

Technology did the heavy lifting from there. We built data integration and management tools to consolidate and standardize sources. AI and algorithms extracted and classified data from unstructured documents like building plans, producing a more complete picture of every property. Hosted in the cloud, the platform enabled secure access and real-time collaboration from anywhere. The result: dramatically better efficiency and accuracy — and a foundation strong enough for Bowery to fundraise and scale.

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Venture Studio

Building product is the easy part for Unicorn — we have some of the best engineers and tech minds on the planet. The harder questions: how do you ensure a startup succeeds? How do you equip non-technical founders to build a SaaS company with traction? The answer is good due diligence and deep collaboration. When we take on a startup, we’re all-in. Cesar was a co-founder and partner at Unicorn, and he joined Bowery full-time to see it through. We didn’t just build a product for Bowery — we built a business. Working alongside John and Noah, we dug into the market’s challenges and opportunities, helping the company win over investors and raise $61.8 million to date.