From the first moment we met with the founders, Marc Wohlschlaeger, Dr. Maciej Merkel, and Michael Wetzel, we were impressed with their knowledge of the industry and diligence in addressing the problems it faces. They bring years of experience to the table, combined with trust from the industry players who are willing to work with the CREX Capital team from day one.

CREX Capital revolutionizes commercial real estate (CRE) financing with their end-to-end (E2E) lending infrastructure, created to back the first licensed real estate neobank. CREX brings to the market a unique proposition, which, besides matchmaking and workflow automation, delivers a banking-level solution supporting financing structuring, AI-driven reasoning, and evaluation regarding the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) impact.

The intransparent nature of CRE financing created a substantial market for brokerage and advisory as the CRE financing process is riddled with high costs of market access, redundancies, mediocre analysis, and manual processes. This market could be more efficient as participants rely on and pay intermediaries to ensure everything goes well. In 2021, a transaction volume of over $141 billion was realized in Germany alone, making the commercial real estate financing market one of the most relevant economic sectors in the country. The CREX Capital approach will reduce current process costs by more than 50% and accelerate the current transaction speed from up to 6 months to only a few days.

Meet the team behind CREX Capital

The team consists of five people, including the three co–founders. The three co-founders have a combined 50+ years of experience in commercial real estate finance and banking, which is how they came across the industry's pain points. The team has complementary expertise in serving senior management and MD positions in banking companies like Aareal Bank, Commerzbank, Berlin Hyp, or Wells Fargo and focusing on commercial real estate financing.

Working alongside the cofounders are Andrei Holban, CTO, and Grzegorz Iwanek, Head of Agile Development. Andrei is responsible for the technological setup and development of the platform. He is also a highly adaptable IT specialist with over 10 years of programming experience, of which he spent more than three years in CTO roles. Grzegorz, who also goes by Greg, ensures the proper cooperation between product development and technical excellence. Greg also focuses on the value-maximizing aspect using the best agile approach.

Why we’re excited to invest

One of the main exciting factors is that the team behind CREX Capital combines the skills and experience needed to disrupt their industry — which is very hard to disrupt as an ‘outsider’ and on top of that, an offering that addresses the needs of industry players in the whole lifecycle of the process. Although the company was only founded a few months ago, the founders have already proved with their impressive traction that the solution is needed; the real estate investors are approaching them from day one to use CREX’s expertise. Anna Kazmierczak, Ventures Analyst at Plug and Play, feels that this is the beginning of an industry evolution, stating “we are confident that the team behind CREX are the people that will challenge the status quo and digitize the old-fashioned commercial real estate financing sector.”