SmartRent, which provides smart home automation for property owners, developers, and residents, raises $60M Series C led by Spark Capital
SmartRent, which provides smart home automation for property owners, managers, developers, and residents, today announced that it has raised $60 million.
Context & Ripple Effects
SmartRent has now doubled its raise cadence in a year: the $60M Series C led by Spark Capital follows the $32M Series B led by Bain Capital in mid-2019, both rounds aimed at the same wedge — smart home automation sold through multifamily property managers and developers rather than individual consumers.
That B2B route matters because it sidesteps the retail hardware economics of consumer hubs like Brilliant's $199 smart home hub, and it lands amid a broader wave of capital into rental-market software, from Apartment List's $50M Series C to Berlin middleman startup Home.
First-order effects
- SmartRent gets balance-sheet room to scale deployments across multifamily portfolios, with property owners and managers — not renters — as the paying customers.
- Spark Capital adds a proptech infrastructure bet alongside its consumer and frontier-tech portfolio, taking the lead investor seat Bain Capital occupied a year earlier.
Second-order effects
- Consumer-facing smart home players like Brilliant face a rival whose distribution runs through property managers' bulk installations, pressuring them toward builder and manager channels of their own.
- Multifamily developers evaluating automation vendors now see a category with successive nine-figure rounds, raising the bar for any competing pilot to prove enterprise-grade reliability.
Third-order effects
- The funding arc — Series B, then Series C, then a SPAC merger valuing SmartRent at $2.2B within two years — shows smart-building automation maturing into a consolidated infrastructure layer for rentals rather than a gadget market.
- If property-manager-led deployment keeps winning over consumer retail, apartment operators become the gatekeepers deciding which smart home standards reach residents at scale.
The trend: Smart home automation is consolidating around property-owner and developer channels, with institutional capital treating building infrastructure as a platform business.