James Groch

James Groch spent roughly 35 years in commercial real estate, primarily at Trammell Crow Company and CBRE Group. He joined Trammell Crow at age 23 and became the firm's youngest partner in 1988. He rose to senior C-suite roles there and, in December 2006, orchestrated the sale of the NYSE-listed Trammell Crow Company to CBRE.

At CBRE he held multiple top executive positions over more than a decade, including Chief Financial Officer, Head of Corporate Development, Global Group President, and Chief Investment Officer. From early 2014 he led both financial management and capital deployment, and later transitioned to focus full-time on capital allocation as Chief Investment Officer. During his tenure he led the acquisition of more than 90 companies — including multiple SaaS businesses — oversaw the development of two software platforms, and managed balance-sheet restructuring through the financial crisis, helping transform CBRE into a Fortune 150 company and Fortune's #1-ranked real estate company on its "World's Most Admired" list. He announced his early retirement from CBRE effective June 30, 2020.

Since leaving CBRE, Groch co-founded and serves as Executive Chairman of Ethos Development, LLC, a Philadelphia-based firm that partners with leading institutional investors to develop Class A+ industrial/distribution real estate in the Mid-Atlantic region. In parallel he advises CEOs of public and private companies and invests personally as an angel. He sits on the board of WEX Inc. (NYSE: WEX), where he chairs the Finance Committee (elected May 2020), and on the board of the global NGO Evidence Action.

He earned his MBA from the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia. (His undergraduate education is not disclosed in public sources.)

• Invests as an individual angel, distinct from his institutional real estate work at Ethos Development.
• Documented public investing centers on FinTech, enterprise SaaS/applications, and benefits/insurance-tech, mirroring the software and M&A expertise he built acquiring 90+ companies (many SaaS) at CBRE.
• Brings a CFO/CIO and corporate-development lens — capital allocation, M&A, balance-sheet discipline, and scaling — rather than a thematic early-stage-only mandate.
• His single publicly recorded deal was a growth-stage Series B, suggesting comfort investing alongside established institutional VCs rather than pure pre-seed bets.
• *No public stated thesis or defined check-size range was found; specifics should be confirmed directly with him.*