Anika Begay
EliseAI, a company developing a suite of AI-powered property management tools for landlords, has raised $75 million in a Series D round that values the startup at $1 billion.
EliseAI is the brainchild of co-founder and CEO Minna Song, who met the company’s second co-founder, Tony Stoyanov, while both were undergraduates at Cambridge. After graduating, Song moved to New York City, where she took a job as an administrative assistant at a residential real estate agency.
Song has seen at his company how inefficiencies in the rental and leasing industry, particularly those related to communicating with current and prospective tenants, were contributing to exhaustion and burnout among management teams, he says.
“Recognizing this challenge, Stoyanova and I set out to build AI software to automate communication,” Song told TechCrunch, “and founded EliseAI in 2017.”
Today, EliseAI employs an army of chatbots to text, email, and answer calls from renters about things like apartment tours, maintenance requests, lease renewals, and delinquencies. Song says the chatbots are trained on questions and conversations from renters—both people looking to rent apartments and current residents—and are designed to automatically forward requests to humans when needed.
“We only use data that we have generated internally,” Song said. “We do not purchase or use external data. This gives us control over the data we use.”
As a generally privacy-conscious person, I would be wary of texting chatbots like EliseAI with personal information and volunteering chats for the company’s AI training. So I asked Song about EliseAI’s data retention policies. He said the company allows users to request that their data be deleted, to opt out of providing their information for training, and, in compliance with laws like the California Consumer Privacy Act, to receive a copy of all the data EliseAI has about them.
“We do not sell, relicense, or otherwise share any consumer data for any reason,” Song added. “Consumer data is the sole property of our relevant client, a property manager or landlord, and we use that data only for limited purposes as expressly permitted by our client agreements, our privacy policy, and applicable law.”
Some reviews of EliseAI’s chatbots are critical, suggesting that nuance isn’t AI’s strong suit. According to one reviewer, the chatbots, which don’t clearly identify themselves as AI, sometimes fail to engage managers and agents when they should and book property viewings without key information like a move-in date or phone number.
However, Song says EliseAI’s chatbots are “steadily improving their ability to anticipate renter needs” and, on average, are increasing rental tour bookings by 125% while reducing late payments by 50%, according to the company’s internal data.
“Our technology is designed for single-family and multifamily rental property owners, operators and third-party property management companies to improve operational efficiency, reduce technology stacks and costs associated with single-point solutions, increase occupancy, reduce late payments and improve the tenant experience,” Song said.
In addition to chatbots, EliseAI offers a dashboard where property managers can stay on top of requests from prospects and residents (e.g., work orders), generate reports on operations, and monitor the progress of renewals. The dashboard is free with all of EliseAI’s AI products, which the company offers as modules with pricing based on a software-as-a-service model.
EliseAI competes with vendors like Colleen AI, Funnel, Knock, and Leasehawk. Song says the company has more than 350 customers, including 70% of the top 50 rental housing operators in the U.S.
“We have not pursued hyper-growth in headcount, instead focusing on controlled hiring and sustainable loss management, while consistently investing strategically in revenue growth,” Song said. “We have seen funding remain strong for companies like EliseAI that are effectively addressing enduring business challenges like operational efficiency, especially in core markets like housing, which are always in demand.”
With another successful funding round under its belt, EliseAI, which employs about 150 full-time staff in its New York office, plans to expand further into a somewhat unexpected market: healthcare. Song thinks much of the company’s technology stack could be adapted to meet the administrative needs of healthcare practices, such as appointment scheduling, billing, and payments.
In fact, EliseAI launched a healthcare solution called HealthAI in 2023, and Song says several providers are already using it.
But it’s a crowded market; EliseAI will have to compete with startups like Hyro, which use AI to manage text and voice conversations between healthcare organizations and their patients.
Sapphire Ventures led the round with participation from Point72 Private Investments, Divco West, Navitas Capital and Koch Real Estate Investments. Bringing EliseAI’s total raised to $140 million, the new capital will be used for hiring, AI research and development, product development and supporting EliseAI’s go-to-market efforts, Song said.
“Our main goal was to bring an excellent partner to the company; that’s why we chose Sapphire,” Song added. Sapphire partner Cathy Gao will join EliseAI’s board of directors.
“While EliseAI is currently the most widely adopted AI platform in this space, the residential real estate market is still in the early stages of harnessing AI to its full potential,” Gao said in a statement. “I believe the company is well-positioned to lead the charge in real estate and deliver similar results in new verticals like healthcare.”
