Follow the Money Edition 23

Blue Own Raises Big

Deep Insight: Blue Own Breaks the Drought

This week marked the most significant break in the real estate equity fundraising drought we’ve seen all year. Blue Owl Capital closed its Digital Infrastructure Fund III with $7 billion in total commitments, surpassing its original $4 billion target and hitting its hard cap. It’s the largest real estate equity raise in recent months—and it didn’t go to traditional property types like office, multifamily, or retail. It went to data centers.

This fund will focus on developing, acquiring, and owning large-scale digital infrastructure to serve hyperscalers—tech companies with massive compute needs driven by AI and cloud growth. Blue Owl’s pitch is clear: there is a long-term need for purpose-built, high-density data centers, and very few firms have the capital or operational scale to meet that demand.

The investors agreed. Backers included a global mix of pensions, insurance companies, sovereign wealth funds, asset managers, and family offices from the U.S., Europe, Asia-Pacific, and the Middle East.

This confirms a shift we’ve been tracking: capital hasn’t disappeared, but it’s being allocated selectively. Traditional real estate fundraising is still slow, but infrastructure-aligned strategies—especially those tied to AI and cloud services—are attracting large institutional capital.

Credit remains the dominant capital flow in most sectors. But this week shows that for strategies with long-term demand drivers and institutional backing, real estate equity can still scale.

Venture

• EventWood, a Norwegian developer of super-strong woods, raised $15M in a first close of its Series A round. Grantham Foundation led, joined by Baruch Future Ventures, Builders VC, and Muus Climate Partners.

• Nawy, an Egyptian proptech startup, raised $29M in Series A funding led by Partech Africa (plus $23M in debt).

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• TensorWave, a Las Vegas-based data center provider, raised $100M. Magnetar and AMD Ventures co-led, joined by Maverick Silicon, Nexus Venture Partners and Prosperity7.

• Flock Exchange, an exchange for retiring real estate owners, raised $20M in Series B funding. Renegade Partners led, joined by existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Primary Venture Partners, Susa Ventures, and 1Sharpe.

• Entrata, a Lehi, Utah-based provider of property management software for the multifamily industry, raised $200M from Blackstone at a $4.3B valuation.

• Pronto, a platform for booking laundry and other domestic services, raised $2M in seed funding led by Bain Capital Ventures.