Another Softbank-backed real estate startup — not WeWork, not Compass and not Opendoor, but construction startup Katerra — is showing signs of strain.
Fritz Wolff, who also runs his family’s private equity firm, has left the board of Katerra but “maintains an advisory role,” a company spokesperson told the Real Deal.
Wolff’s departure marks yet another shakeup at the company. It follows a report from The Information that the firm pulled out of a number of construction projects. And the company has run through three CEOs in the past four years, according to The Real Deal.
Katerra, a prefab construction startup, has raised at least $1 billion from venture capital behemoth SoftBank. A conspicuous number of SoftBank’s portfolio companies have stumbled in the past year. While two of its ride-hailing babies, Uber and Lyft, have seen their market caps tumble by tens of billions of dollars since going public, the biggest SoftBank letdown has been the implosion of co-working startup WeWork.
Two of SoftBank’s other big bets in real estate are Compass, which has seen executive shakeups over the past year, and Opendoor, which conducted some layoffs in a staff consolidation reported in June.
