Groma Raises Over $20 Million in Series A Funding

(Boston, MA) - January 30, 2023

GromaCorp, Inc. (“Groma”) announced its Series A funding of over $20M led by Castle Island Ventures with participation from other notable investors, including Bantam Group, Echelon, Launchpad Venture Group, Osbon Capital, and others. GromaCorp is also announcing the formation of its Advisory Board with initial members Mike Gordon (President, Fenway Sports Group), Jonathan Kraft (President, The Kraft Group), Bryan Pellegrino (CEO, LayerZero), Joel Moxley (Partner, Echelon), Jeremy Sclar (Chairman and CEO, WS Development), Jeff Swearingen (Founder and Former CEO SecureLink), and Matt Walsh (Partner, Castle Island Ventures), who will serve on the Advisory Board and GromaCorp’s Board of Directors.

Groma believes that the world works better when everyone owns a part of it. That’s a big vision, and to make incremental progress towards it, we’re hard at work innovating at the intersection of housing, blockchain, and financial services. While still very much in the early stages, Groma has hit significant milestones already. On behalf of the investors and funds it advises, Groma currently operates 40+ buildings in the Greater Boston area representing 300+ units and nearly $200 million of assets. Groma uses technology to lower costs and increase the quality of tenants' experience, providing competitively priced, high-quality housing to tenants and compelling risk-adjusted returns to investors. Groma is active in advocating for growth-oriented housing policy, seeking not only to increase the overall supply of housing in major cities, lowering housing costs for everyone, but to create opportunities for community members to have a stake in the growth around them as well.

This new round of funding will be used to accelerate the technological development of Groma’s platform, including further investments into blockchain technology to provide transparent, immutable reporting of the performance and other key characteristics of Groma’s properties to investors. Seth Priebatsch, President of Groma, remarked, “In a challenging macro environment, we are thrilled to have raised this funding round to continue to grow the Groma platform. We are at the very early stages of what we’re seeking to build but see significant opportunity ahead as we innovate at the intersection of real estate, prop-tech, and blockchain.” Prior to Groma, Seth Priebatsch was the founder of LevelUp, which sold to Grubhub for ~$400 million in 2018 and then was Chief Revenue Officer of Grubhub through its $7 billion sale to Just Eat Takeaway in 2021.

As part of this round of funding, Matt Walsh, partner at Castle Island Ventures, a leading blockchain venture firm, will be joining the GromaCorp, Inc. Board of Directors. “At Castle Island Ventures, we spend all our time thinking about ways that blockchain can be a transformative force across many industries,” said Walsh. “We see what Groma is doing as a novel, and very exciting, application of public blockchains to the real estate sector, one of the largest stores of value in the world.”

Additionally, Michael J. Hagan, a serial entrepreneur, cofounder of LevelUp, and angel investor in the Boston area, will be joining GromaCorp’s Board as the first independent director. “I’ve worked with many of the team members at Groma before during the LevelUp days, and these are some of the hardest working people out there,” said Hagan. “They’ve latched on to what I believe is yet another big idea, and while it’s going to be a lot of work, I’m excited to see them bring it to fruition over the coming years.”