New Delhi, July 10 -- The Dubai Future District Fund (DFDF), the region's first evergreen venture capital fund-of-funds, has made a limited partner (LP)-style investment in a proptech fund, only a few weeks after it backed a Washington, DC-based realty-related fund in May.
The DFDF, the sovereign-backed investment vehicle that was set up more than four years ago to support seed to growth-stage tech startups, will anchor New York-based venture capital fund MetaProp's fourth fund.
This is the second investment into an American real estate-focussed fund from DFDF in less than two months. Previously, in May, it said it committed capital as an LP in the fifth flagship fund of Camber Creek, a Washington, DC-headquartered venture capital firm that makes investments in the real estate sector.
MetaProp, founded in 2015 by Aaron Block, Zach Aarons and Zak Schwarzman, is an early-stage proptech fund. It invests primarily in pre-seed, seed and Series A startups developing technology for real estate, construction, infrastructure, climate, insurance, finance and adjacent sectors. It has backed more than 175 technology companies involved in the real estate value chain since its inception.
"MetaProp represents exactly the kind of early-stage, sector-specialist manager we want anchoring our proptech portfolio," said Nader Albastaki, managing director of DFDF.
MetaProp also runs an accelerator programme in the United States, and the two firms are now planning to introduce a Dubai module to bring founders into direct contact with regional stakeholders in the UAE region.
"Through this partnership, MetaProp's portfolio companies will gain access to DFDF's regional network of stakeholders and operators, creating a direct bridge for US-based proptech innovators seeking to enter and scale [up] across the Middle East," DFDF said in a statement.
MetaProp's fourth fund has a target corpus of $150 million. It invests primarily in North America, while also investing selectively in Asia, particularly Japan. The fund also counts Japan's Daibiru Corporation, a Mitsui O.S.K. Lines group company, and New York City Economic Development Corporation's NYC Catalyst Fund amongst its LPs.
"We built MetaProp around the belief that proptech companies require access to the most knowledgeable operators and strategists in real estate to achieve outsized returns for VC investors," said Aaron Block, co-founder and managing partner, MetaProp. "DFDF's commitment strengthens our ability to back the most promising founders while deepening our engagement in the MENA region."
Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from VC Circle.