Online fundraising startup inks 15K-square-foot lease at Industry City

Industry City has inked another new lease on its campus, signing the online fundraising platform Fundraise Up to a three-year, 15,000-square-foot deal.

Fundraise Up has opened its second headquarters at the Sunset Park complex. The company was founded in 2017 and just recently finished its Series A funding round. It uses artificial intelligence to help nonprofits, among them UNICEF USA, the American Heart Association and the World Health Organization Foundation, raise money.

Asking rents at the 35-acre, 16-building Industry City campus range from $15 to $40 per square foot. Fundraise Up is in Building 3, and it has an eye on potentially expanding.

“The goal is to be up and running immediately—while spending very little capital—in hopes that the space will be quickly outgrown,” Kathe Kramer Chase, Industry City’s director of leasing, said in a statement.

The pandemic increased the growth rate for Fundraise Up, as in-person fundraising events largely came to an end last year, Fundraise Up CEO Peter Byrnes said.

“The need for an optimized way to capture donations became more essential with the halt of in-person fundraising events in 2020,” he said, “so the speed at which we operate has grown drastically within the last year.”

Jeff Fein, senior vice president for Industry City, represented the landlord internally in the lease. Fundraise Up did not use a broker.

Other startups based at Industry City include the payment application company Square and the used photo and video equipment platform MPB. The furniture brand West Elm recently expanded its footprint at the campus, adding a 15,000-square-foot outlet store to bring its total presence at Industry City to 128,000 square feet.

Industry City went through one of the most contentious rezoning efforts in recent New York history last year. Brooklyn Councilman Carlos Menchaca announced in July that he was opposed to the rezoning, but multiple other members of the council spoke up in favor of the project and the economic benefits it would bring to the city in its bid to recover from the pandemic.

The developers behind the rezoning push ultimately determined that this support was not enough, however, and they withdrew their application in September. The property owners have since shifted their focus to using the space they already have on the campus.

New York’s office market has struggled greatly amid the pandemic as companies have instituted widespread working-from-home policies. Brooklyn saw about 230,000 square feet of office leasing activity during the first quarter of the year, a nearly 50% drop quarter over quarter and a 40.7% drop year over year, according to a report from Colliers International.

The borough’s availability rate last quarter was 24.1%, up from 23.9% during the fourth quarter of 2020 and 23.1% during the first quarter of last year.

*This is an article from Crain’s New York Business published on May 24, 2021; See the original article here.

Learn more about leasing space at IC here.