Groundbreaker was just chicken-scratch on a napkin in 2011 when Jake underwrote real estate investments at a growing REIT in Chicago. Preparing investment materials was cumbersome and handling investor relations was done with cobbled-together solutions like spreadsheets, decks, file storage for documents, and email. Managing data and answering to investors was a time-intensive, manual process. There had to be a better way.

A few years passed and the commercial real estate industry is changing before our eyes. Technology can dramatically change the way firms invest in real estate, investors are becoming more tech-savvy, and these forces created an opportunity for real estate investment firms to embrace new tools that unlock pent-up growth. So we created Groundbreaker to promote and empower this evolution.