This article first appeared in Term Sheet, Fortune's newsletter on deals and dealmakers. Sign up here.
Increasingly, venture investors view real estate as the next industry to be transformed by disruptive technology. But as they start investing in the category, they might find that traditional real estate investors, including Brookfield Property Partners, one of the country's largest landlords, are already ahead of them.
Convene, a New York City-based startup, is Brookfield's only startup investment, and today Brookfield has doubled down on the bet. Brookfield led a $68 million Series C investment in the company alongside Conversion Venture Capital and ArrowMark Partners, the companies tell Fortune. The Durst Organization and Elysium Capital Management also participated. Convene previously raised $45 million in funding. Brookfield is "eager to explore working with and investing in" exiting startups, a company spokesperson said.
Convene's business - "workplace as a service" — takes some explaining, which might be why CEO Ryan Simonetti frequently employs comparisons to other companies. "We are helping landlords run an office building like a full service lifestyle hotel," he says. "It's the Starwood-ification of real estate."
Also: "What's happening to landlords is, they're the taxi cab industry before Uber. Convene is offering them the ability to not be disintermediated."
And also: "We often get compared to WeWork, but we believe co-working is the first step in a much larger opportunity."
Essentially, Convene manages the amenities of an office building, like the food, the conference rooms, event spaces, the gym. It currently offers 12 "branded" retail locations in three U.S. cities. In addition, the company offers a "managed amenities" package to landlords, where the company handles the service part of all those amenities. Notably, Convene offers these services on behalf of the landlords, not the tenants. Tenants are increasingly asking for these things when they move in, Simonetti says, and landlords are willing to pay for them. It has opened two of those so far in New York City.
Simonetti was previously an investor at Lehman Brothers, where he focused on office buildings and hotels. Amid the financial crisis, he realized landlords weren't paying attention to the needs of their customers. They weren't providing "amenity-rich experiences" the same way boutique hotels and luxury condo developers were starting to, he says.