Winter Park tech startup Leasecake on April 9 announced the closure of a $10 million series A extension round.
An extension round brings the infusion of additional funding from existing or new investors under the same terms as the previous financing round. Until now, the company had raised $16 million since its founding in 2017.
Leasecake, led by New York-based PeakSpan Capital and Las Olas Venture Capital in Fort Lauderdale with additional support from Silicon Valley Bank, will use the funding to further integrate AI into its platform, which helps multi-unit restaurant and retail store owners get better lease terms and manage locations.
Company executives did not share the specific improvements that will be made beyond the current functionality, and did not specify how many hires will be made, although Vice President of Marketing Michel Benjamin said the staff is growing.
Leasecake CEO Scott Williamson said the operational landscape for multi-unit restaurants and service-based retailers is challenging, and continual improvements to the platform will alleviate stress and “empower clients to concentrate on expansion.”
"AI allows our clients to analyze numerous contracts simultaneously, pinpointing issues in seconds that historically may take days or weeks to review manually,” Chief Product Officer and Co-Founder Dave Schrader told Orlando Business Journal.
Schrader described the product this way: “Instead of spending hours getting details out of documents, AI can do a lot of it automatically. Instead of spending time building reports, you can just ask questions like ‘What renewals do I have coming up this year?’ AI allows us to deliver value to our customers faster and simpler.”
Leasecake has grown rapidly, earning the company an OBJ Fire Award in 2023. At the start, former CEO Taj Adhav wasn’t confident about his idea for Leasecake, but others disagreed.
“I thought it was a bad idea until I pitched it and we won a global tech competition across 200 cities and 58 countries. I decided to buy the domain, leasecake.com, for $11.99,” he told OBJ in 2023.
He was talking about Techstars Startup Weekend, which is produced by the venture capital firm Techstars. This was no small win. In the span of one weekend, Leasecake had a complete business model, dozens of interviews with tenants and property owners to verify its idea — and even had a paying customer — beating out 12,000 other Startup Weekend participants.
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