VendorPM, a marketplace for property managers to manage, source and procure service vendors, just announced their $6 million seed round, led by Bessemer Venture Partners, joined by Forum Ventures and other leading prop tech investors.

We are honored and excited to be part of this round. VendorPM was part of the first Toronto-specific cohort in the Forum Ventures accelerator program in 2020 and we’ve been working closely with the team ever since.

The first time I spoke to Emiel Bril, Founder and CEO of VendorPM, about joining our accelerator, I was immediately taken back by his story. Emiel is a young founder, which makes sense given he started his first company when he was 14. Having lost his father at a young age, he wanted to help support his family and started knocking door to door to wash windows. Anyone who’s ever done door to door sales knows the level of dedication, self confidence and perseverance it requires. We love betting on these type of founders.

By the age of 21, he had 40 people working for him and real revenue coming in — $1M a year. Eventually Emiel transitioned into the world of commercial real estate, servicing buildings, which was when he started truly understanding the restrictions of both selling to property managers, and property managers finding vendors they could trust. It’s highly manual and inefficient.

Emiel saw an opportunity to fix that — to make it easier and more efficient for site staff and provide more visibility and control to head office in terms of vendor sourcing, procurement, and management.

When Emiel first came to Forum Ventures with VendorPM, we very quickly knew we wanted to invest. Not only does Emiel possess incredibly strong founder-market fit with first hand experience of the problem, but this is a monstrous market opportunity as all commercial and industrial companies have this challenge. Emiel also had a clear way to solve the chicken and egg problem of the marketplace: a SaaS tool first to sell to property managers and build a big enough customer base from which he could easily get vendors.

Once we started working with Emiel in the accelerator, we were instantly impressed by his hustle and how hard he worked. As a result, the team started to show traction very quickly on the property manager side.

Since then, the company has grown to manage a two-sided marketplace across Canada supporting thousands of property managers to organize all aspects of their vendor relationships and resources — sourcing, procurement, management, and compliance. Vendors use the platform to market their services and provide quotations and proposals. The platform supports 400+ building services across maintenance, operations, capital expenditures and professional services.

When it came time for VendorPM to raise their Seed round, the only decision we had to make was how much allocation we could get. This was one of those very infrequent, very happy decisions you get to make as an investor, as everything we thought would happen, actually happened.

In less than 2 years, VendorPM has seen 20x revenue growth, and has rapidly scaled the business to cover more than 5,000 buildings, 30,000 vendors and 100 property management firms, and is rapidly expanding into new markets across Canada and the USA.

Working closely with Emiel has been an absolute pleasure. His tenacity, dedication and natural leadership have created incredible momentum for VendorPM. I’ve been lucky enough to work side by side with him in our Toronto office for over a year now, watching first hand how he’s navigated being a tech founder, building a world class product and team of 40+ people, and now raising this $6M seed round from Bessemer.

Next up for VendorPM? Continued success. Expansion into the U.S. A product that continues to be built out. Adjacent market share. And much more. It’s our absolute favorite working with a founder from before there is a single line of code or customer and watching them blossom into this.

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An engineer by trade, Jonah Midanik has spent the last twenty years at the intersection of marketing and technology as a serial entrepreneur in Canada. Jonah has had several different lenses on the founder journey from bootstrapping, to launching new corporate divisions, and raising 8 figures of venture capital. Jonah currently spends his time helping Canadian companies grow with Forum Ventures.

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