Allen Preger

Allen Preger is a Partner at Building Ventures, a Boston-based early-stage venture firm focused on the built environment, where he leads the firm's West Coast presence from San Francisco. A native of the San Francisco Bay Area, he holds a BA in Economics and Math from Occidental College. He brings roughly three decades of product, sales, and entrepreneurial leadership experience in built-environment technology to the firm's founders and portfolio companies.

Preger's operating career spans several landmark companies in architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) software. He spent about a decade at venture-funded Softdesk, which built the first commercially successful suite of CAD applications for architects, engineers, and contractors. After working as a sales engineer in North America, he relocated to Singapore to lead the company's expansion into Asia Pacific. Softdesk raised venture capital, completed a successful IPO, and was ultimately acquired by Autodesk — where Preger became a product manager working on Autodesk's first generation of building information modeling (BIM) products.

He later co-founded Newforma, serving as Chief Product Officer, where he led the team that built the company's project information management solution — a product that became a global industry standard for design and consulting engineering firms. During his time with Newforma he also spent three years in London as VP of Global Strategy.

At Building Ventures, Preger manages the firm's board-level involvement with portfolio companies including Hypar (a generative design platform) and Parspec (an AI platform for construction product sales and specification). He also oversees the Building Ventures Innovators Network (BVIN), a proprietary community of more than one hundred industry leaders that the firm uses for deal sourcing, customer introductions, and diligence.

• Invests in technology transforming how the world designs, builds, and operates the built environment — spanning AEC/construction tech, real estate tech, and building-lifecycle software.
• Focuses on seed to Series A, with the majority of capital deployed at the seed ("sapling") stage — investing "when a company is still early enough in its formative development that our team's experience, expertise, and network can help it attract the best talent and optimal early customers."
• Backs experienced, mission-driven founders in the built-environment space; the firm's operator-heavy team and BVIN network are positioned as value-add beyond capital.
• Fund II ($95M, closed Sept 2022) is designed to invest in 18–20 seed-to-Series-A construction and real estate tech startups improving every stage of the full building lifecycle.
• Preger's personal focus areas reflect his background: design software, generative/computational design, BIM, and construction workflow/data platforms.